BEAUTIFUL 
THOUGHTS 







4^^ 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Chap,. __._._. Copyriiilit X(». 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



41980 

LIbr«iy of Gor»..o->n« 
''\fcO (WIS ^ix.ii^iO 

SEP 1 1900 

SiO'^iO COPY. 

OtulH DIVISION, 
SFP 6 1.3Q 



COPYRIGHT, 1900. BV 
JAM KS POTT & CO 



T/fy 



/^ 



74242 



PREFACE 



EuGGED and uncouth as Carlyle's 
style is, it yet has the merit of arresting 
the attention of the reader, and forcing 
him to dwell on the lessons which the 
sage of Chelsea desires to inculcate. 
Carlyle's object was to show that, how- 
ever important the mere trappings and 
insignia of rank and powder were, they 
could not for long retain the respect 
and veneration, of the world unless they 
really were the outward symbols of 
virile manhood. To Carlyle Might was 
Eight, because he believed that Eight 
was always strong and mighty by 
reason of its inherent justice and force. 
Hence Carlyle could be in sympathy 
with the brutal Csesarism of Frederick 
the Great or of Cromwell, as well as 
with the equally brutal force of the un- 



PREFACE 



known units who made up the People 
in the days of the triumphant Revolution 
in France. 

All that was strong claimed his homage. 
Shams and subterfuges were the butt 
of his sarcasm because they were the 
symbols of weakness. The really strong 
man disdained all lies because he was 
powerful enough to be truthful, oven if 
truth was brutal in its expression. It is 
in his delineation of the forces and pas- 
sions that move great men and great 
masses of people that Carlyle compels 
our admiration, and has added to our 
literature an abundance of " Beautiful 
Thoughts." Thoughts that are "Beauti- 
ful," not by reason of their elegance of 
diction or of expression, but "Beautiful" 
in their strength and ruggedness, having 
the beauty not of the flower but of the 
grey granite that towers above the pretty 
verdure at its feet. 



JANUARY 



January ist. 

Hope deferred maketh the heart 
sick. And yet, as we said, Hope is 
but deferred ; not abolished, not abolish- 
able. It is very notable and touching, 
how this same Hope does still light on- 
wards the French Nation through all its 
wild destinies. For we shall still find 
Hope shining, be it for fond invitation, 
be it for anger and menace; as a mild 
heavenly light is shown; as a red con- 
flagration it shines: burning sulphurous 
blue, through darkest regions of Terror 
it still shines; and goes not out at all, 
since Desperation itself is a kind of 



8 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Hope. Thus is our Era still to be 
named of Hope, though in the saddest 
sense, — when there is nothing left but 
Hope. 

French Revolution. 

January 2d. 
The wealth of a man is the number of 
things which he loves and blesses, which 
he is loved and blessed by ! 

Past and Present 

January jd. 
A healthy nature may or may not be 
great; but there is no great nature that 
is not healthy. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

January 4th. 
Obedience is our universal duty and 
destiny; wherein whoso will not bend 
must break : too early and too thoroughly 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE g 

we cannot be trained to know that 
Would, in this world of ours, is as mere 
Zero to Should, and for most part 
as the smallest of fractions even to Shall. 

Sartor Resartus, 

January 3th. 
In a valiant suffering for others, not 
in a slothful making others suffer for us, 
did nobleness ever lie. The chief of 
men is he who stands in the van of men ; 
fronting the peril which frightens back 
all others ; which, if it be not vanquished, 
will devour the others. Every noble 
crown is, and on Earth will forever be, 
a crown of thorns. 

Fas( and Present. 

January 6th. 
Clothes gave us individuality, dis- 
tinctions, social pohty; Clothes have 



lo BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

made Men of us; they are threatening 
to make Clothes-screens of us. 

Sartor Resartus. 

January yth. 

In Books lies the soul of the whole 
Past Time; the articulate audible voice 
of the Past, when the body and mate- 
rial substance of it has altogether van- 
ished like a dream. Mighty fleets and 
armies, harbours and arsenals, vast 
cities, high-domed, many-engined, — 
they are precious, great: but what do 
they become ? Agamemnon, the many 
Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their 
Greece; all is gone now to some ruined 
fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and 
blocks: but the Books of Greece! 
There Greece, to every thinker,still very 
literally lives; can be called up again 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE ii 

into life. No magic Rune is stranger 
than a Book. All that Mankind has 
done, thought, gained or been : it is 
lying as in magic preservation in the 
pages of Books. They are the chosen 
possession of men. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

January 8th. 

But indeed, in all things, writing or 
other, which a man engages in, there 
is the indispensablest beauty in know- 
ing how to get do?ie. A man frets him- 
self to no purpose ; he has not the 
sleight of the trade; he is not a crafts- 
man, but an unfortunate borer and 
bungler, if he know not when to have 
done. Perfection is unattainable: no 
carpenter ever made a mathematically 
accurate right-angle in the world; yet 



12 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

all carpenters know when It is right 

enough, and do not botch it, and lose 

their wages, by making it too right. 

Too much painstaking speaks disease 

in one's mind, as well as too little. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

January gth. 

There are but two ways of paying 
debt: increase of industry in raising 
income, increase of thrift in laying it 
out. 

Past and Present. 

January lOth. 

I venture to assert, that the exercise 
of priv^ate judgment, faithfully gone 
about, does by no means necessarily 
end in selfish independence, isolation; 
but rather ends necessarily in the oppo- 
site of that. It is not honest inquiry 



FROM THOMA S CARLYLE 13 

that makes anarchy; but it is error, 
insincerity, half-belief and untruth that 
make it. A man protesting against etror 
is on the way towards uniting himself with 
all men that believe in truth. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

January nth. 

For if new-got gold is said to burn 
the pockets till it be cast forth into 
circulation, much more may new Truth. 

Sartor Resartus. 

January 12th. 

Mammon is like Fire; the usefulest 
of all servants, if the frightfulest of all 
masters. 

Past and Present. 

January iph. 

Frightful to all men is death ; from 
of old named King of Terrors. Our 



14 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

little compact home of an Existence, 
where we dwelt complaining, yet as in 
a home, is passing, in dark agonies, 
into an Unknown of Separation, For- 
eignness, unconditioned Possibility. 
The Heathen Emperor asks of his soul : 
Into what places art thou now depart- 
ing ? The Catholic King must answer: 
To the Judgment-bar of the Most High 
God ! Yes, it is a summing-up of Life ; 
a final settling, and giving-in the *'ac- 
count of the deeds done in the body:" 
they are done now; and lie there un- 
alterable, and do bear their fruits, long 
as eternity shall last. 

French Revolution. 

January 14th. 

Habit is our primal, fundamental 
law; Habit and Imitation, there is 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 15 

nothing more perennial in us than these 
two. They are the source of all Work- 
ing and all Apprenticeship, of all 
Practice and all Learning, in this world. 

Past and Present. 

January i^th. 

The world has to obey him who 
thinks and sees in the world. The 
world can alter the manner of that; 
can either have it as blessed continuous 
summer sunshine, or as unblessed black 
thunder and tornado, with unspeakable 
difference of profit for the world ! The 
manner of it is very alterable; the 
matter and fact of it is not alterable 
by any power under the sky. Light; 
or failing that, lightning; the world 
can take its choice. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



i6 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

January i6th. 

Truly a thinking Man is the worst 
enemy the Prince of Darkness can have ; 
every time such a one announces him- 
self, I doubt not, there runs a shudder 
through the Nether Empire; and new 
Emissaries are trained, with new tactics, 
to, if possible, entrap him, and hood- 
wink and handcuff him. 

Sartor Resartus. 

January lyth. 

We take it for granted, the most 
rigorous of us, that all men who have 
made anything are expected and en- 
titled to make the loudest possible 
proclamation of it; call on a discerning 
public to reward them for it. Every 
man his own trumpeter; that is, to a 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 1 7 

really alarming extent, the accepted 
rule. 

Past and Prtsent. 

January i8th. 

The suffering man ought really " to 
consume his own smoke; " there is no 
good in emitting smoke till you have 
made it mio fire, — which, in the meta- 
phorical sense too, all smoke is capa- 
ble of becoming! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

January igth. 

Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any 
part of thy Life, in a satisfactory man- 
ner. Give it, like a royal heart; et 
the price be Nothing: thou hast then, 
in a certain sense, got All for it! The 
heroic man, — and is not every man. 



18 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

God be thanked, a potential hero ? — 
has to do so, in all times and circum- 
stances. 

Past and Present. 

January 20th. 

An unbelieving Eighteenth Century 
is but an exception, — such as now and 
then occurs. I prophesy that the 
world will once more become sincere ; 
a believing world; with mariy Heroes 
in it, a heroic world! It will then be 
a victorious world, never till then. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

January 21st. 
Nature, like the Sphinx, is of wom- 
anly celestial loveliness and tenderness; 
the face and bosom of a goddess, but 
ending in claws and the body of a 
lioness. There is in her a celestial 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 19 

beauty, — which means celestial order, 
pliancy to wisdom; but there is also a 
darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are 
infernal. 

Past and Present. 

January 2 2d. 

Meanwhile, observe with joy, so 
cunningly has Nature ordered it, that 
whatsover man ought to obey he can- 
not but obey. Before no faintest rev- 
elation of the Godlike did he ever 
stand irreverent; least of all, when the 
Godlike showed itself revealed in his 
fellowman. 

Sartor Resartus. 

January 2sd. 

Where thou findest a Lie that is op- 
pressing thee, extinguish it. Lies exist 



20 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

there only to be extinguished; they 
wait and cry earnestly for extinction. 
Think well, meanwhile, in what spirit 
thou wilt do it: not with hatred, with 
headlong selfish violence; but in clear- 
ness of heart, with holy zeal, gently, 
almost with pity. Thou wouldst not 
replace such extinct Lie by a new Lie, 
which a new Injustice of thy own were; 
the parent of still other Lies ? Whereby 
the latter end of that business were 
worse than the beginning. 

French Revolution. 

January 24th. 

Under all speech that is good for 
anything there lies a silence that is 
better. Silence is deep as Eternity; 
speech is shallow as Time. 

Sir Walter Scott. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 21 

January 2^th. 

The merit of originality is not novelty ; 
it is sincerity. The believing man is 
the original man; whatsoever he be- 
lieves he believes it for himself, not 
for another. Every son of Adam can 
become a sincere man, an original man, 
in this sense; no mortal is doomed to 
be an insincere man. Whole ages, 
what we call ages of Faith, are original; 
all men in them, or the most of men 
in them, sincere. These are the great 
and fruitful ages: every worker, in all 
spheres, is a worker not on semblance 
but on substance; every work issues in 
a result: the general sum of such work 
is great; for all of it, as genuine, tends 
towards one goal; all of it is additive^ 
none of it subtractive. There is true 



22 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

union, true kingship, loyalty, all true 
and blessed things, so far as the poor 
Earth can produce blessedness for men. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

January 26th. 

Meanwhile, what theory is so cer- 
tain as this, That all theories, were 
they never so earnest, painfully elabo- 
rated, are, and, by the very conditions 
of them, must be incomplete, question- 
able, and even false ? Thou shalt know 
that this Universe is, what it professes 
to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to 
swallow it, for thy logical digestion; 
be thankful, if skilfully planting down 
this and the other fixed pillar in the 
chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee. 

French Revolution. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 23 

January 2yth. 

Of a truth, if man were not a poor 
hungry dastard, and even much of a 
blockhead withal, he would cease criti- 
cising his victuals to such extent; and 
criticise himself rather, what he does 
with his victuals! 

Past and Present. 

January 28th. 

Silence and Secrecy ! Altars might 
still be raised to them (were this an 
altar-building time) for universal wor- 
ship. Silence is the element in which 
great things fashion themselves to- 
gether ; that at length they may emerge, 
full-formed and majestic, into the day- 
light of Life, which they are thence- 
forth to rule. Not William the Silent 
only,but all the considerable men I have 



24 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

known, and the most undipromatic and 
unstrategicof these,foreboretobabbleof 
what they were creating and projecting. 

Sartor Resartus. 

January 2<)th. 
To speak in the ancient dialect, we 
"have forgotten God;" — in the most 
modern dialect and very truth of the 
matter, we have taken up the Fact of 
this Universe as it is not. We have 
quietly closed our eyes to the eternal 
Substance of things, and opened them 
only to the Shows and Shams of things. 
We quietly believe this Universe to be 
intrinsically a great unintelligible Per- 
haps; extrinsically, clear enough, it is 
a great, most extensive Cattlefold and 
Workhouse, with most extensive 
Kitchen-ranges, Dining-tables, — where- 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 25 

at he is wise who can find a place! 
All the Truth of this Universe is un- 
certain ; only the profit and loss of it, 
the pudding and praise of it, are and 
remain very visible to the practical man. 

Past and Present. 

January ^oth, 

Man and his Life rest no more on 
hoUowness and a Lie, but on solidity 
and some kind of Truth. Welcome, 
the beggarliest truth, so it de one, in 
exchange for the royallest sham ! 
Truth of any kind breeds ever new and 
better truth ; thus hard granite rock will 
crumble down into soil, under the blessed 
skyey influences; and cover itself with 
verdure, with fruitage and umbrage. But 
as for Falsehood, which in like contrary 
manner, grows ever falser, — what can 



26 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

it,or what should it do but decease, being 
ripe; decompose itself, gently or even 
violently, and return to the Father of 
it, — too probably in flames of fire ? 

French Revolution. 

January ^ist. 

What is tolerance ? Tolerance has 
to tolerate the ?/«essential ; and to see 
well what that is. Tolerance has to be 
noble, measured, just in its very wrath, 
when it can tolerate no longer. But, 
on the whole, we are not altogether 
here to tolerate! We are here to re- 
sist, to control and vanquish withal. 
We do not "tolerate" Falsehoods, Iniq- 
uities, when they fasten on us; we say 
to them, Thou art false and unjust. We 
are here to extinguish Falsehoods, and 
put an end to them, in some wise way. 



FEBRUARY 



February isf. 

On the whole, how unknown is a 
man to himself; or a public Body of 
men to itself! ^sop's fly sat on 
the chariot-wheel, exclaiming. What a 
dust I do raise ! Great Governors, clad 
in purple with fasces and insignia, are 
governed by their valets, by the pout- 
ing of their women and children; or, 
in Constitutional countries, by the par- 
agraphs of their Able Editors. Say 
not, I am this or that; I am doing this 
or that ! For thou knowest il not, thou 
knowest only the name it as yet goes 
by. A purple Nebuchadnezzar rejoices 
to feel himself now verily Emperor of 
this great Babylon which he has 
builded; and is a nondescript biped- 



30 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

quadruped, on the eve of a seven-years 
course of grazing! 

French Revolution. 

Fehruary 2d. 

Thought without reverence is barren, 
perhaps poisonous; at best, dies like 
Cookery with the day that called it 
forth; does not live, like sowing, in 
successive tilths and wider-spreading 
harvests, bringing food and plenteous 
increase to all time. 

Sartor Resartus. 

February ^d. 

Our highest Religion is named the 
" Worship of Sorrow." For the son of 
man there is no noble crown, well 
worn, or even ill worn, but is a crown 
of thorns! 

Past and Present. 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 3 1 

February 4th. 

The uttered part of a man's life, let 
us always repeat, bears to the unuttered 
unconscious part a small unknown pro- 
portion ; he himself never knows it, 
much less do others- Give him room, 
give him impulse ; he reaches down to 
the Infinite with that so straitly-im- 
prisoned soul of his; and can do mir- 
acles if need be! It is one of the 
comfortablest truths that great men 
abound, though in the unknown 
state. 

Sir Walter Scott 

February ^th. 

Sense can support herself handsome- 
ly, in most countries, for some eighteen- 
pence a day ; but for Fantasy planets and 



33 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

solar systems will not suffice. Witness 
your Pyrrhus conquering the world, yet 
drinking no better red wine than he 
had before. 

Sartor Resartus. 

February 6tli. 

If Hero mean siiiccre nian, why may 
not every one of us be a Hero ? A 
world all sincere, a believing world: 
the like has been; the like will again 
be, — cannot help being. That were 
the right sort of Worshippers for 
Heroes: never could the truly Better 
be so reverenced as where all were 
True and Good ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

February yth. 

My brother, the brave man has to 
give his Life away Give it, I advise 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 33 

thee; — thou dost not expect to sell thy 
Life in an adequate manner ? What 
price, for example, would content thee? 
The just price of thy Life to thee, — 
why, God's entire Creation to thyself, 
the whole Universe of Space, the whole 
Eternity of Time, and what they hold: 
that is the price which would content 
thee; that, and if thou wilt be candid, 
nothing short of that! 

Past and Present. 

February 8th. 

Masses, indeed; and yet, singular to 
say, if, with an effort of imagination, 
thou follow them, over broad France, 
into their clay hovels, into their garrets 
and hutches, the masses consist all of 
units. Every unit of whom has his 



34 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

own heart and sorrows; stands covered 
there with his own skin, and if you 
prick him he will bleed. O purple 
Sovereignty, Holiness, Reverence; 
thou, for example, Cardinal Grand- 
Almoner, with thy plush covering of 
honour, who hast thy hands strength- 
ened with dignities and moneys, and 
art set on thy world watch-tower sol- 
emnly, in sight of God, for such ends, 
— what a thought: that every unit of 
these masses is a miraculous Man, even 
as thyself art; struggling, with vision, 
or with blindness, for Jiis infinite King- 
dom (this life which he has got, once 
only, in the middle of Eternities); with 
a spark of the Divinity, what thou cal- 
lest an immortal soul, in him! 

French Revolution. 



FROM THOMA S CA RL VLB 3 5 

February gth. 

"That there should one Man die Igno- 
rant who had capacity for Knowledge, 
this I call a tragedy,' were it to happen 
more than twenty times in the minute, 
as by some computations it does. The 
miserable fraction of Science which our 
united Mankind, in a wide Universe of 
Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, 
with all diligence, imparted to all ? 

Sartor Resartus 

February loth. 

For the Earth, I say, is an earnest 
place; Life is no grimace, but a most 
serious fact. 

Past and Present. 

February nth. 

Luther learned 7ww that a man was 
saved not by si?iging masse s^ but by the 



36 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

infinite grace of God; a more credible 
hypothesis. He gradually got himself 
founded, as on the rock. No wonder 
he should venerate the Bible, which 
had brought this blessed help to him. 
He prized it as the Word of the Highest 
7nust be prized by such a 7nan. He de- 
termined to hold by that: as through life 
and to death he firmly did. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



February 12th. 

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is 
the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not 
incoherent, self-distracting, self-de- 
structive one! In the harmonious 
adjustment and play of all the faculties, 
the just balance of oneself gives a just 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLH 37 

feeling towards ah men and all things. 
Glad light from within radiates out- 
wards, and enlightens and embel- 
lishes. 

Sir Walter Scott. 



Fehrtiary i^th. 

There is a clear truth in the idea 
that a struggle from the lower classes 
of society, towards the upper regions 
and rewards of society, must ever con- 
tinue. Strong men are born there, 
who ought to stand elsewhere than 
there. The manifold, inextricably 
complex, universal struggle of these 
constitutes, and must constitute, what 
is called the progress of society. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



38 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

February 14th. 

A paradoxical philosopher, carrying 
to the uttermost length that aphorism 
of Montesquieu's, '' Happy the people 
whose annals are tiresome," has said, 
"Happy the people whose annals are 
vacant." In which saying, mad as it 
looks, may there not still be found 
some grain of reason ? For truly, as 
it has been written, " Silence is divine," 
and of Heaven; so in all earthly things 
too there is a silence which is better 
than any speech. Consider it well, 
the Event, the thing which can be 
spoken of and recorded, is it not, in 
all cases, some disruption, some solu- 
tion of continuity ? Were it even a 
glad Event, it invoh^es change, involves 
loss (of active Force); and so far, either 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 39 

in the past or in the present, is an irreg- 
ularity, a disease. Stillest perseverance 
were our blessedness; not dislocation 
and alteration, — could they be avoided. 

French Revolution. 



February i§th. 

The man who cannot laugh is not 
only fit for treasons, stratagems, and 
spoils; but his whole life is already a 
treason and a stratagem. 

Sartor Resartus. 



February i6th. 

To reconcile Despotism with Free- 
dom: — well, is that such a mystery? 
Do you not already know the way ? 



40 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

It is to make your Despotism just. 
Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as 
Destiny and its Laws. 

Past and Present. 



Fehrnary lyth. 

The Constitution, the set of Laws, 
or prescribed Habits of Acting, that 
men will live under, is the one which 
images their Convictions, — their Faith 
as to this wondrous Universe, and 
what rights, duties, capabilities they 
have there; which stands sanctioned, 
therefore, by Necessity itself; if not 
by a seen Deity, then by an unseen 
one. Other Laws, whereof there are 
always enough ready-mdidQ, are usurpa- 
tions; which men do not obey, but 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 41 

rebel against it, and abolish, by their 
earliest convenience. 

French Revolution. 



February i8th. 

A fundamental mistake to call vehe- 
mence and rigidity strength! A man 
is not strong who takes convulsion fits; 
though six men cannot hold him then.> 
He that can walk under the heaviest 
weight without staggering, he is the 
strong man. We need forever,/espe- 
cially in these loud-shrieking days, to 
remind ourselves of that. A man who 
cdinnoi hold his peace, till the time comes 
for speaking and acting, is no right 
man. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



42 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

February ipth. 

Honour to the strong man, in these 
ages, who has shaken himself loose of 
shams and is something. 

French Revolution. 

February 20th. 

Every noble work is at first " impos- 
sible." In very truth, for every noble 
work the possibilities will lie diffused 
through Immensity: inarticulate, un- 
discoverable except to faith. 

Past and Present. 

February 21st. 

How true also, once more, is it that 
no man or Nation of men, conscious of 
doing a great thing, was ever, in that 
thing, doing other than a small one! 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 43 

O Champ-de-Mars Federation, with 
three hundred drummers, twelve hun- 
dred wind-musicians, and artillery 
planted on height after height to boom 
the tidings of it all over France, in a 
few minutes! Could no Atheist-Nai- 
geon contrive to discern, eighteen 
centuries off, those Thirteen most poor 
mean-dressed men, at frugal Supper, 
in a mean Jewish dwelling, with no 
symbol but hearts God-initiated into 
the " Divine depth of Sorrow," and a 
Do this in remembrance of me ; — and so 
cease that small difficult crowing of 
his, if he were not doomed to it ? 

French Revolution. 

February 22d. 
Labour is not a devil, even while 
encased in Mammonism: Labour is 



44 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ever an imprisoned God, writhing un- 
consciously or consciously to escape 
out of Mammonisni ! 

Past and Present. 

February 2jd. 

Despise not the rag from which man 
makes Paper, or the litter from which 
the Earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed 
no meanest object is insignificant; all 
objects are as windows, through which 
the philosophic eye looks into Infini- 
tude itself. 

Sartor Resartus. 

/February j.fth. 
On all hands of us, there is the an- 
nouncement, audible enough, that the 
old Empire of Routine has ended; that 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 45 

to say a thing has long been, is no 
reason for its continuing to be. The 
things which have been are fallen into 
decay, are fallen into incompetence; 
large masses of mankind, in every 
society of our Europe, are no longer 
capable of living at all by the things 
which have been. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

Fehruary 2^th. 

Work is of a religious nature :- — work 
is of a brave nature; which it is the 
aim of all religion to be. "All work 
of man is as the swimmer's:" a waste 
ocean threatens to devour him; if he 
front it not bravely, it will keep its 
word. By incessant wise defiance of 
it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold 



46 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

how it loyally supports him, bears him 
as its conijucror along, 

Past and Present. 

Pcbniary 26th. 

When a man's life feels itself to be 
sick and an error, no voting of by- 
standers can make it well and a truth 
again. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

Fchruary 2/th. 

At all turns, a man who \\'\\\.do faith- 
fully, needs to believe firmly. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

February 28th. 

With these signs of the times, it is 
not surprising that the dominant feel- 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 47 

ing all over France was still continually 
Hope ? O blessed Hope, sole boon 
of man; whereby, on his strait prison 
walls, are painted beautiful far-stretch- 
ing landscapes; and into the night of 
very Death is shed holiest dawn! 
Thou art to all an indefeasible posses- 
sion in this God's-world: to the wise 
a sacred Constantine's-banner, written 
on the eternal skies; under which they 
shall conquer, for the battle itself is 
victory: to the foolish some secular 
mirage, or shadow of still waters, 
painted on the parched Earth; whereby 
at least their dusty pilgrimage, if de- 
vious, becomes cheerfuller, becomes 
possible. 

French Revolution 



48 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

February zgth. 
" Protection of property," of what is 
"mine'* means with most men protection 
of money, — the thing which, had I a 
thousand padlocks over it, is least of 
all min^; is, in a manner, scarcely worth 
calling mine! 

/^asi and Present, 



MARCH 



March ist. 
Great is Bankruptcy: the great bot- 
tomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, 
public and private, do sink, disappear- 
ing; whither, from the first origin of 
them, they were all doomed. For 
Nature is true and not a lie. No he 
you can speak or act but it will come, 
after longer or shorter circulation, like 
a Bill drawn on Nature's Realty, and 
be presented there for payment, — with 
the answer, ?to effects. Pity only that 
it often had so long a circulation: 
that the original forger were so seldom 
he who bore the final smart of it ! Lies, 
and the burden of evil they bring, are 
passed on; shifted from back to back, 
and from rank to rank; and so land 



52 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, 
who with spade and mattock, with 
sore heart and empty wallet, daily come 
in contact with reality, and can pass the 
cheat no further. 

French Revolution. 

March 2d. 

To learn obeying is the fundamental 
art of governing. How much would 
many a serene Highness have learned, 
had he travelled through the world with 
water-jug and empty wallet, sine omni 
expejisa; and at his victorious return, 
sat down not to newspaper-paragraphs 
and city-illuminations, but at the foot 
of St. Edmund's Shrine to shackles 
and bread and water! He that cannot 
be servant of many, will never be 
master, true guide and deliverer of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 53 



many; — that is the meaning of true 
mastership. 



Past and Prestnt. 

March 3d. 
What you see, yet cannot see over, 
is as good as infinite. 

Sartor Resartus. 

March 4th. 

Habit is the deepest law of human 
nature. It is our supreme strength; 
if also, in certain circumstances, our 
miserablest weakness. 

Past and Present. 

March 5th. 

If we think of it, all that a Univer- 
sity, or final highest School can do for 
us, is still but what the first School be- 



54 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

gan doing, — teach us to read. We 
learn to read, in various languages, in 
various sciences; we learn the alphabet 
and letters of all manner of Books. 
But the place where we are to get knowl- 
edge, even theoretic knowledge, is the 
Books themselves! It depends on 
what wo read, after all manner of Pro- 
fessors have done their best for us. 
The true University of these days is a 
collection of Books. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

March 6th. 

Perhaps our greatest poets are the 
tmite Miltons; the vocals are those 
whom by happy accident we lay hold 
of, one here, one there, as it chances, 
and make vocal. 

Sir Walter Scott. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 55 

March /th. 

Discipline we called a kind of mir- 
acle: in fact, is it not miraculous how 
one man moves hundreds of thousands; 
each unit of whom it may be loves him 
not, and singly fears him not, yet has 
to obey him, to go hither or go thither, 
to march and halt, to give death, and 
even to receive it, as if a Fate had 
spoken; and the word-of-command 
becomes, almost in the literal sense, a 
magic-word. 

French Revolution. 



March 8th, 

When Belief waxes uncertain, Prac- 
tice too becomes unsound. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



56 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

March Qth. 

What is the use of health, or of life, 
if not to do some work therewith ? 
And what work nobler than transplant- 
ing foreign Thought into the barren 
domestic soil; except Indeed planting 
Thought of your own, which the fewest 
are privileged to do ? 

Sartor Resartus. 

March loth. 

In all battles, if you await the issue, 
each fighter has prospered according 
to his right. His right and his might, 
at the close of the account, were one 
and the same. He has fought with 
all his might, and in exact proportion 
to all his right he has prevailed. 

Past and Present. 



FROM THOMA S CARL YLE 5 7 

March nth. 

Man, '' Symbol of Eternity im- 
prisoned into Time ! '' is not thy works, 
which are all mortal, infinitely little, 
and the greatest no greater than the 
least, but only the Spirit thou workest 
in, that can have worth or continuance. 

French Revolution. 

March 12th. 

Men believe in Bibles, and disbe- 
lieve in themS but of all Bibles the 
frightfullest to disbelieve in is this 
" Bible of Universal History/' This 
is the Eternal Bible and God's-book, 
" which every born man," till once the 
soul and eyesight are extinguished in 
him, '* can and must, with his own eyes, 
see the God's- Finger writing!" 

Past and Present. 



58 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

March ijth. 

As indeed this, and the like of this, 
which we now call Scepticism, is pre- 
cisely the black malady and life-foe, 
against which all teaching and dis- 
coursing since man's life began has 
directed itself; the battle of Belief 
against Unbelief is the never-ending 
battle! Neither is it in the way of 
crimination that one would wish to 
speak. Scepticism, for that century, 
we must consider as the decay of old 
ways of believing, the preparation afar 
off for new, better and wider ways, — 
an inevitable thing. We will not blame 
men for it; we will lament their hard 
fate. We will understand that destruc- 
tion of old forms is not destruction of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 59 

everlasting substatues ; that Scepticism, 
as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, 
is not an end but a beginning. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

j March 14th. 

For men's hearts ought not to be 
set against one another; but set with 
one another, and all against the Evil 
Thing only. 

Fast and Present. 



March i^th. 

Of this thing, however, be certain: 
wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then 
plant into the deep infinite faculties of 
man his Fantasy and Heart; wouldst 
thou plant for Year and Day, then 
plant into his shallow superficial fac- 



6o BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ulties, his Self-love and Arithmetical 
Understanding, what will grow there. 

Sartor Rtsartus. 

March i6th. 

When a Nation is unhappy, the 
old Prophet was right and not wrong 
in saying to it: Ye have forgotten God, 
ye have quitted the ways of God, or 
ye would not have been unhappy. It 
is not according to the laws of Fact 
that ye have lived and guided your- 
selves, but according to the laws of 
Delusion, Imposture, and wilful and 
unwilful Mistake of Fact ; behold there- 
fore the Unveracity is worn out; Na- 
ture's long suffering with you is ex- 
hausted; and ye are here. 

Past and Present. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 6i 

March lyth. 

As for man, his conflict is continual 
with the spirit of contradiction, that is 
without and within; with the evil 
spirit (or call it, with the weak, most 
necessitous, pitiable spirit), that is in 
others and in himself. His walk, like 
all walking (say the mechanicians), is 
a series oi falls. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

March i8th. 

Is not Light grander than Fire ? It 
is the same element in a state of purity. 

Past and Present. 

March ipth. 
Between vague wavering Capability 
and fixed indubitable Performance, 
what a difference! A certain inarticu- 



62 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

late Self-consciousness dwells dimly in 
us ; which only our works can render 
articulate and decisively discernible. 
Our Works are the mirror wherein the 
spirit first sees its natural lineaments. 
Hence, too, the folly of that impossible 
Precept, Knoii) thyself ; till it be trans- 
lated into this partially possible one, 
Knoiv what thou canst ivork at. 

Sartor Resartus. 

March 20th. 

"Infinite admiration," we are taught, 
"means worship." 

Pas/ and Present. 

March 21st. 
As if Thought, Power, of Thinking, 
were not, at all times, in all places and 
situations of the world, precisely the 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 63 

thing that was wanted. The fatal man, 
is he not always the imthinking man, the 
man who cannot think and see; but only 
grope, and hallucinate, and missQt the 
nature of the thing he works with? He 
missees it, mistakes it as we say ; takes it 
for one thing, and it is another thing, — 
and leaves him standing like a futility 
there ! He is the fatal man : unutterably 
fatal, put in the high places of men. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

March 22d. 

For indeed it is well said^ "in every 
object there is inexhaustible meaning; 
the eye sees in it what the eye brings 
means of seeing." To Newton and to 
Newton's Dog Diamond, what a different 
pair of Universes ; while the painting on 



64 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

the optical retina of both was, most like- 
ly, the same. • 

French Revolution. 

March 2^d, 
Ah yes, soil, with or without plough- 
ing, is the gift of God. The soil of all 
countries belongs evermore, in a very 
considerable degree, to the Almighty 
Maker ! The last stroke of labor be- 
stowed on it is not the making of its 
value, but only the increasing thereof. 

Pasi and Present. 

March 24th. 
Any man may get through work rapid- 
ly who easily satisfies himself about it. 
Print the talk of any man, there will be 
a thick octavo volume daily; make his 
writing three times as good as his talk, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 65 

there will be the third part of a volume 
daily, which still is good work. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

March 2^th. 

Deep in the heart of the noble man it 
lies forever legible, that, as an Invisible 
Just God made him, so will and must 
God's Justice and this only, were it never 
so invisible, ultimately prosper in all con- 
troversies and enterprises and battles 
whatsoever. What an Influence; ever- 
present, — like a Soul in the rudest Cali- 
ban of a body ; like a ray of Heaven, and 
illuminative creative Fiat-Lux, in the 
wastest terrestrial Chaos ! Blessed divine 
Influence, traceable even in the horror of 
Battlefields and garments rolled in blood : 
how it ennobles even the Battlefield ; and, 



66 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

in place of a Chactaw Massacre, makes 
it a Field of Honour ! 

Past and Present. 

March 26th. 
Not our Logical, IMensurative faculty, 
but our Imaginative one is King over us ; 
I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead 
us heavenward ; or Magician and Wizard 
to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the 
basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the 
implement of Fantasy ; the vessel it 
drinks out of? 

Sartor Resartus. 

March 2/th. 
Observe, however, beyond the Atlan- 
tic, has not the new day verily dawned ! 
Dem.ocracy, as we said, is born; storm- 
girt, is struggling for life and victory. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 67 

A sympathetic France rejoices over the 
Rights of Man ; in all saloons, it is said, 
What a spectacle ! 

French Revolution. 

March 28th. 
First must the dead Letter of Religion 
own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into 
dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, 
freed from this its charnel-house, is to 
arise on us, newborn of Heaven, and 
with new healing under its wings. 

Sartor Resartus. 

March 2^th. 
Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, 
in Formulas ; all men do so. In general 
the more completely cased with Formulas 
a man may be, the safer, happier it is for 
him. 

Past and Present. 



68 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

March ^oth. 
Great is Journalism. Is not every 
Able Editor a Ruler of the World, being 
a persuader of it ; though self-elected, 
yet sanctioned, by the sale of his Num- 
bers? Whom indeed the world has the 
readiest method of deposing, should need 
be: that of merely doing nothing to him ; 
which ends in starvation ! 

I'rench Revolution. 

March ^rsf. 
lie that can write a true Book, to per- 
suade England, is not he the Bishop and 
Archbishop, the Primate of England and 
of All England? I many a time say, 
the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, 
Poems, Books, these arc the real work- 
ing effective Church of a modern 
country. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



APRIL 



April 1st. 

Hast thou considered how each man's 
heart is so tremulously responsive to 
the hearts of all men ; hast thou noted 
how omnipotent is the very sound of 
many men? How their shriek of indig- 
nation palsies the strong soul ; their howl 
of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? 
The Ritter Gliick confessed that the 
ground-tone of the noblest passage, in 
one of his noblest Operas, was the voice 
of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, 
crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! 
Great is the combined voice of men ; the 
utterance of their instincts, which are 
truer than their thoughts: it is the great- 



72 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

est a man encounters, among the sounds 
and shadows, which make up this World 
of Time. He who can resist that, has 
his footing somewhere beyond Time. 

French Revolution. 



'April 2d. 

A brave man, strenuously fighting, 
fails not of a little triumph, now and 
then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere 
we try at least to give the adversary as 
good as he brings ; and, with swift force 
or slow watchful manoeuvre, extinguish 
this and the other solecism, leave one 
solecism less in God's Creation ; and so 
proceed with our battle, not slacken or 
surrender in it ! 

Past and Present. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 73 

April 3d. 

For there is no heroic poem in the 
world but is at bottom a biography, the 
Hfe of a man : also, it may be said, there 
is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, 
but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed 
or unrhymed. 

Sir Walter Scott. 



April 4th. 

What changes are wrought, not by 
Time, yet in Time. For not Mankind 
only, but all that Mankind does or be- 
holds, is in continual growth, re-genesis 
and self-perfecting vitality. Cast forth 
thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living, 
ever-working Universe : it is a seed-grain 
that cannot die; unnoticed to-day (says 



74 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

one), it will be found flourishing as 
a Banyan-grove (perhaps, alas, as a 
Hemlock-forest!) after a thousand 
years. 

Sartor Resartits. 



'April f,th. 

Reality is of God's making; it is alone 
strong. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

April 6th. 

Men's years are numbered, and the 
tale of Mirabeau's was now complete. 
Important, or unimportant ; to be men- 
tioned in World-History for some cen- 
turies, or not to be mentioned there be- 
yond a day or two, — it matters not to 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 75 

peremptory Fate. From amid the press 
of ruddy busy Life, the Pale Messenger 
beckons silently: wide-spreading inter- 
ests, projects, salvation of French Mon- 
archies, what thing soever man has on 
hand, he must suddenly quit it all, 
and go. Wert thou saving French Mon- 
archies ; wert thou blacking shoes on the 
Pont Neuf! The most important of 
men cannot stay; did the World's His- 
tory depend on an hour, that hour is not 
to be given. Whereby, indeed, it comes 
that these same would-have-beens are 
mostly a vanity ; and the World's History 
could never in the least be what it would, 
or might, or should, by any manner of 
potentiality, but simply and altogether 
what it is. 

French Revolution. 



76 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

April /th. 

Eloquence in three languages is good ; 
but it is not the best. To us, as already 
hinted, the Lord Abbot's eloquence is less 
admirable than his /^eloquence, his great 
invaluable **talent of silence !" 

Past and Present. 

April 8th. 

Man is, properly speaking, based upon 
Hope, he has no other possession but 
Hope; this world of his is emphatically 
the Place of Hope. 

Sartor Resarius. 

April p///. 

Literature is our Parliament too. 
Whoever can speak, speaking now to 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 77 

the whole nation, becomes a power, a 
branch of government, with inahenable 
weight in law-making, in all acts of 
authority. It matters not what rank he 
has, wliat revenues or garnitures : the 
requisite thing is, that he have a tongue 
which others will listen to ; this and noth- 
ing more is requisite. The nation is 
governed by all that has tongue in 
the nation: Democracy is virtually 
there. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



April lOth. 

It is not known that the Tongue of 
Man is a sacred organ ; that Man him- 
self is definable in Philosophy as an 
"Incarnate Word." 

Past and Present. 



78 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

April nth. 

Levelling is comfortable, as we often 
say: levelling, yet only down to oneself. 
Your pale-white Creoles, have their 
grievances: — and your yellow Quarter- 
oons? And your dark-yellow Mulattoes? 
And your Slaves soot-black? 

French Revolution. 

April I2th. 

Veracity : it is the basis of all ; and, 
some say, means genius itself; the prime 
essence of all genius whatsoever. 

Past and Present. 

April i^th. 

There is a great discovery still to be 
made in Literature, that of paying 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 



79 



literary men by the quantity they do not 
write. Nay, in sober truth, is not this 
actually the rule in all writing; and, 
moreover, in all conduct and acting? 
Not what stands aboveground, but what 
lies unseen under it, as the root and sub- 
terrene element it sprang from and em- 
blemed forth, determines the value. 

Sir Walter Scett. 

April 14th. 
A High Class without duties to do is 
like trees planted on precipices ; from the 
roots of which all the earth has been 
crumbling. 

Past and Present. 

April i^th. 
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, 
the language of the Devil; for which 



So BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

reason I have long since as good as re- 
nounced it. 

Sartor Re sarins. 



April 1 6th. 

Union, organisation, spiritual and ma- 
terial, a far nobler than any Popedom or 
Feudalism in their truest days, I never 
doubt, is coming for the world ; sure to 
come. But on Fact alone, not on Sem- 
blance and Simulacrum, will it be able 
either to come, or to stand when come. 
With union grounded on falsehood, and 
ordering us to speak and act lies, we will 
not have anything to do. Peace? A 
brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome 
grave is peaceable. We hope for a liv- 
ing peace, not a dead one. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



FROM THOMA S CARL YLE 8i 



April I'/th. 
For Justice and Reverence are the 
everlasting central Law of this Universe ; 
and to forget them, and have all the 
Universe against one, God and one's own 
self for enemies, and only the Devil and 
the Dragons for friends, is not that a 
"lameness" like few? 

Past and Present. 

April i8th. 
Man is not what one calls a happy ani- 
mal ; his appetite for sweet victual is so 
enormous. How, in this wild Universe, 
which storms in on him, infinite, vague- 
menacing, shall poor man find, say not 
happiness, but existence, and footing to 
stand on, if it be not by girding himself 
together for continual endeavour and en- 



82 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

durance? Woe, if in his heart there 
dwelt no devout Faith ; if the word Duty 
has lost its meaning for him ! For as to 
this of Sentimentalism, so useful for 
weeping with over romances and on 
pathetic occasions, it otherwise verily will 
avail nothing ; nay less. The healthy 
heart that said to itself, "How healthy 
am I !" was already fallen into the fatal- 
est sort of disease. Is not Sentimental- 
ism twin-sister to Cant, if not one and 
the same with it? Is not Cant the 
materia prima of the Devil ; from which 
all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations 
body themselves; from which no true 
thing can come? For Cant is itself 
properly a double-distilled Lie; the sec- 
ond-power of a Lie. 

French Revolution. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 83 

April ipth. 

Genius is "the inspired gift of God." 
It is the clearer presence of God Most 
High in a man. Dim, potential in all 
men; in this man it has become clear, 
actual. 

Fas^ and Present. 



'April 20th. 

The Situation that has not its Duty, its 
Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. 
Yes here, in this poor, miserable, ham- 
pered, despicable Actual, wherein thou 
even now standest, here or nowhere is 
thy Ideal : work it out therefrom ; and 
working, believe, live, be free. 

Sartor Resartus. 



84 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

April 2ist. 

My friend, all speech and rumor is 
shortlived, foolish, untrue. Genuine 
Work alone, what thou workest faith- 
fully, that is eternal, as the Almighty 
Founder and World-Builder himself. 
Stand thou by that ; and let "Fame" 
and the rest of it go prating. 

Past and Present. 

April 22d. 

We say not that ; but we do say, that 
ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat, 
is battle (in a good or in a bad cause) 
with bad success; that health alone is 
victory. Let all men, if they can man- 
age it, contrive to be healthy ! He who 
in what cause soever sinks into pain and 
disease, let him take thought of it; let 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 85 

him know well that it is not good he has 
arrived at yet, but surely evil, — may, or 
may not be, on the way towards good. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

April 27d. 

Alas, when madness of choler has gone 
through the blood of men, and gibbets 
have swung on this side and on that, 
what will a parchment Decree and Lafay- 
ette Amnesty do? Oblivious Lethe flows 
not above ground! 

French Revolution. 

April 24th. 

Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime 
material of insincere Action. Action 
hangs, as it were, dissolved in Speech, 
in Thought whereof Speech is the shad- 
ow; and precipitates itself therefrom. 



86 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

The kind of Speech in a man betokens 
the kind of Action you will get from him. 
Our Speech, in these modern days, has 
become amazing. Johnson complained, 
''Nobody speaks in earnest, Sir; there is 
no serious conversation." 

Past and Present. 



April 2^th. 

^ Strange enough how creatures of the 
human-kind shut their eyes to plainest 
facts; and by the mere inertia of Obliv- 
ion and Stupidity live at ease in the 
midst of Wonders and Terrors. But 
indeed man is, and was always, a block- 
head and dullard ; much readier to feel 
and digest, than to think and consider. 
Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 87 

his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and- 
wont everywhere leads him by the nose: 
thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but 
a Creation of the World happen timce, 
and it ceases to be marvellous, to be note- 
worthy, or noticeable. 

Sartor Resartus. 



April 26th. 

Isolation is the sum-total of wretched- 
ness to man. To be cut off, to be left 
solitary : to have a world alien, not your 
world ; all a hostile camp for you ; not a 
home at all, of hearts and faces who are 
yours, whose you are! It is the fright- 
fulest enchantment; too truly a work of 
the Evil One. 

Pasf and Present. 



88 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

/ April 2ph. 

Shall Courtesy be done only to the 
rich, and only by the rich? In Good- 
breeding, which differs, if at all, from 
High-breeding, only as it gracefully re- 
members the rights of others, rather than 
gracefully insists on its own rights, I 
discern no special connection with wealth 
or birth : but rather that it lies in human 
nature itself, and is due from all men 
towards all men. 

Sartor Resartus. 



'April 28th. 

Let Cant cease, at all risks and at 
all costs: till Cant cease, nothing else 
can begin. Of human Criminals, in 
these centuries, writes the Moralist, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 89 

I find but one unforgivable: the 
Quack. 

French Revolution. 

April 2^th. 

The Land is Mother of us all ; nour- 
ishes, shelters, gladdens, lovingly en- 
riches us all ; in how many ways, from 
our first wakening to our last sleep on 
her blessed mother-bosom, does she, as 
with blessed mother-arms enfold us 
all. 

Past and Present. 

April soth. 

Our life is compassed round with Ne- 
cessity ; yet is the meaning of Life itself 
no other than Freedom, than Voluntary , 
Force : thus have we a warfare : in the 



90 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

beginning, especially, a hard-fought 
battle. For the God-given mandate, 
Work thou in IVelldoiug, lies mysteri- 
ously written, in Promethian, Prophetic 
Characters, in our hearts ; and leaves us 
no rest, night or day, till it be disciphered 
and obeyed ; till it burn forth, in our 
conduct, a visible, acted Gospel of Free- 
dom. 

Sartor Resartus. 



MAY 



May 1st. 

For ours is a most fictile world; and 
man is the most fingent plastic of creat- 
ures. A world not fixable; not fathom- 
able! An unfathomable Somewhat, 
which is Not we; which we can work 
with, and live amidst, — and model, 
miraculously in our miraculous Being, 
and name World. — But if the very 
Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic 
teaches), are, in strict language, made by 
those outward Senses of ours, how much 
more, by the Inward Sense, are all Phe- 
nomena of the spiritual kind: Dignities, 
Authorities, Holies, Unholies ! Which 
inward sense, moreover is not permanent 
like the outward ones, but forever grow- 



94 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ing and changing. Does not the Black 
African take of Sticks and Old Clothes 
(say, exported Monmouth-Strect cast- 
clothes) what will suffice, and of these, 
cunningly combining them, fabricate for 
himself an Eidolon (Idol, or Thing 
Seen), and name it Muinbo-Junibo; 
which he can henceforth pray to. with 
upturned awestruck eye, not without 
hope ? The white European mocks ; but 
ought rather to consider ; and see 
whether he, at home, could -not do the like 
a little more wisely. 

French Revolution. 

May 2d 

Formulas too, as we call them, have a 
reality in Human Life. They are real 
as the very skin and muscular tissue of a 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 95 

Man's Life ; and a most blessed indispen- 
sable thing, so long as they have vitality 
withal, and are a living skin and tissue 
to him! No man, or man's life, can go 
abroad and do business in the world 
without skin and tissues. No; first of 
all, these have to fashion themselves, — 
as indeed they spontaneously and inevi- 
tably do. Foam itself, and this is worth 
thinking of, can harden into oyster-shell ; 
all living objects do by necessity form 
to themselves a skin. 

Past and Present. 

May ^d. 

Great truly is the Actual ; is the Thing 

that has rescued itself from bottomless 

deeps of theory and possibility, and 

stands there as a definite indisputable 



96 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Fact, whereby men do work and live, 
or once did so. Wisely shall men cleave 
to that, while it will endure ; and quit 
it with regret, when it gives way under 
them. Rash enthusiast of Change, be- 
ware ! Hast thou well considered all 
that Habit does in this life of ours; how 
all Knowledge and all Practice hang 
wondrous over infinite abysses of the 
Unknown, Impracticable ; and our whole 
being is an infinite abyss, overarched by 
Habit, as by a thin Earth-rind, labori- 
ously built together? 

French Revolution. 



May 4th. 

All Works, each in their degree, are a 
making of Madness sane ; — truly enough 



FROxM THOMAS CARLYLE 97 

a religious operation ; which cannot be 

n. 

Past and Present. 



carried on without rehgion 



May 5th. 
That great mystery of Time^ were 
ithere no other; the ilHmitable, silent, 
never-resting thing called Time, rolling, 
rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-em- 
bracing ocean-tide, on which we and all 
the Universe swim like exhalations, like 
apparitions which are, and then are not: 
this is forever very literally a miracle; 
a thing to strike us dumb, — for we have 
no word to speak about it. 

Heroes and Hero lVorshtJ>. 

May 6th. 
The Past is a dim indubitable fact: 
the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay 



93 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

properly it is the sam^ fact in new dress 
and development. For the Present holds 
in it both the whole Past and the whole 
Future; — as the Life-tree Igdrasil, 
wide-waving, many-toned, has it roots 
down deep in the Death-kingdoms, 
among the oldest dead dust of men, and 
with its boughs reaches always beyond 
the stars ; and in all times and places 
is one and the same Life-tree ! 

Past and Present. 

May yth. 
It is well said, in every sense, that a 
man's religion is the chief fact with re- 
gard to him. A man's or a nation of 
men's. By religion I do not mean here 
the church-creed he professes, the articles 
of faith which he will sign and, in words 
or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 99 

many cases not this at all. We see men 
of all kinds of professed creeds attain to 
almost all degrees of worth or worthless- 
ness under each or any of them. This is 
not what I call religion, this profession 
and assertion ; which is often only a pro- 
fession and assertion from the outworks 
of the man, from the mere argumentative 
region of him, if even so deep as that. 
But the thing a man does practically be- 
lieve (and this is often enough without 
asserting it even to himself, much less to 
others) ; the thing a man does practically 
lay to heart, and know^ for certain, con- 
cerning his vital relations to this mysteri- 
ous Universe, and his duty and destiny 
there, that is in all cases the primary 
thing for him, and creatively determines 
all the rest. 

' Heroes and Hero Worship. 



loo BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

May 8th. 

The Land, by mere hired Governors, 
cannot be got governed. You cannot 
hire men to govern the Land : it is by a 
mission not contracted for in the Stock- 
Exchange, but felt in their own hearts 
as coming out of Heaven, that men can 
govern a Land. 

Past and Present. 

May gth. 

By Symbols, accordingly, is man 
guided and commanded, made happy, 
made wretched. He everywhere finds 
himself encompassed with Symbols, 
recognised as such or not recognised : 
the Universe is but one vast Symbol of 
God ; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is 
Man himself but a Symbol of God; is 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE loi 

not all that he does symbolical ; a revela- 
tion to Sense of the mystic god-given 
Force that is in him ; a "Gospel of Free- 
dom," which he, the "Messias of Nature," 
preaches, as he can, by act and word? 
Not a Hut he builds but is the visible 
embodiment of a Thought; but bears 
visible record of invisible things ; but is, 
in the transcendental sense, symbolical 
as well as real. 

Sartor Resartus. 



/ 



May loth. 
The first of all Gospels is this, that a 
Lie cannot endure forever. 

French Revolution. 



May nth. 
But indeed one of the infalliblest fruits 
of Unwisdom in a Nation is that it can- 



I02 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

not get the use of what Wisdom is actu- 
ally in it : that it is not governed by the 
wisest it has, who alone have a divine 
right to govern in all Nations ; but by 
the sham-wisest, or even by the openly 
not-so-wise if they are handiest other- 
wise! 

Past and Present. 

May 1 2th. 
A man, be the Heavens ever praised, 
is sufficient foi himself; yet were ten 
men, united in Love, capable of being 
and of doing what ten thousand singly 
would fail in. Infinite is the help man 
can yield to man. 

Sartor Resartus. 

May 13 th. 
A great soul, any sincere soul, knows 
not what he is, — alternates between the 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 103 

highest height and the lowest depth ; can 
of all things the least measure — Himself ! 
What others take him for, and what he 
guesses that he may be : these two items 
strangely act on one another, help to 
determine one another. With all men 
reverently admiring him; with his own 
wild soul full of noble ardours and 
affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness 
and glorious new light; a divine Uni- 
verse bursting all into godlike beauty 
round him, and no man to whom the 
like ever had befallen, what could he 
think himself to be? 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

May 14th. 
The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, 
when the Sun and I and all things were 
yet in their auroral hour, who can di- 



104 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

vorce me from it? Mystic, deep as the 
world's centre, are the roots I have 
struck into my Native Soil ; no tree that 
grows is rooted so. From noblest 
patriotism to humblest industrial Mech- 
anism; from highest dying for your 
country, to lowest quarrying and coal- 
boring for it, a Nation's Life depends 
upon its Land. Again and again we 
have to say, there can be no true Aris- 
tocracy but must possess the Land. 

Past and Present. 
May Ijfll. 
Folly is that wisdom which is wise 
only behindhand. 

French Revolution. 

May i6th. 
The higher the Wisdom, the closer 
was its neighborhood and kindred with 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 105 

mere Insanity; literally so, — and thou 
wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe 
how highest Wisdom, struggling up into 
this world, has oftentimes carried such 
tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still 
cleaving to it hither! 

Past and Present. 

May 17th, 
It is an everlasting duty, valid in our 
day as in that, the duty of being 
brave. Valour is still value. The first 
duty for a man is still that of subduing 
Fear. We must get rid of Fear ; we can- 
not act at all till then. A man's acts are 
slavish, not true but specious; his very 
thoughts are false, he thinks too as a 
slave and coward, till he have got Fear 
under his feet. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



io6 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

May 1 8th. 
For if Government is, so to speak, the 
outward skin of the Body PoHtic, hold- 
ing the whole together and protecting it ; 
and all your Craft-Guilds and Associa- 
tions for Industry, of hand or of head, 
are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular 
and osseous Tissues, (lying under such 
skin), whereby Society stands and 
works ; — then is Religion the inmost 
Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which 
ministers Life and Warm Circulation to 
the whole. 

Sartor Resartus. 

May igfh. 
Day's-wages for Day's-work? con- 
tinues he: The progress of Human So- 
ciety consists even in this same, The 
better and better apportioning of wages 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 107 

to work. Give me this, you have given 
me all. Pay to every man accurately 
what he has worl ,d for, what he has 
earned and done and deserved, — to this 
man broad lands and honours, to that 
man high gibbets and treadmills: what 
more have I to ask? Heaven's King- 
dom, which we daily pray for, has come : 
God's will is done on Earth even as it 
is in Heaven ! 

Past and Presetit. 

May 20th. 
See deep enough, and you see musi- 
cally; the heart of Nature being every- 
where music, if you can only reach it. 

Heroes and Hero Worship, 

May 2ist, 
The opinion that is sure of itself, as 
the meagerest opinion may the soonest 



io8 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

be, is the one to which all men will rally. 
Great is Belief, were it never so meagre ; 
and leads captive the doubting heart! 

French Revolution. 

May 22d. 
On the whole, that humorist in the 
Moral Essay was not so far out, who 
determined on honouring health only ; 
and so instead of humbling himself to 
the high-born, to the rich and well- 
dressed, insisted on doffing hat to the 
healthy : coroneted carriages with pale 
faces in them passed by as failures, 
miserable and lamentable ; trucks with 
ruddy-cheeked strength dragging at them 
were greeted as successful and vener- 
able. For does not health mean har- 
mony, the synonym of all that is true, 
justly-ordered, good ; is it not, in some 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 109 



sense, the net-total, as shown by experi- 
ment, of whatever worth is in us ? The 
healthy man is the most meritorious pro- 
duct of Nature so far as he goes. A 
healthy body is good ; but a soul in right 
health, — it is the thing beyond all others 
to be prayed for; the blessedest thing 
this earth receives of Heaven. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

May 23d. 
It has ever been held the highest 
wisdom for a man not merely to submit 
to Necessity, — Necessity will make him 
submit, — but to know and believe well 
that the stern thing that Necessity had 
ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing 
wanted there. To ease his frantic pre- 
tention of scanning this great God's- 
World in his small fraction of a brain; 



no BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

to know that it had verily, though deep 
beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that 
the soul of it was Good; — that his part 
in it was to conform to the Law of the 
Whole, and in devout silence follow that ; 
not questioning it, obeying it as unques- 
tionable. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

May 24th. 
For Nature and Fact, not Redtape and 
Semblance, are to this hour the basis of 
man's life ; and on those, through never 
such strata of these, man and his life and 
all his interests do. sooner or later, in- 
fallibly come to rest, — and to be sup- 
ported or be swallowed according as 
they agree with those. The question is 
asked of them, not, How do you agree 
with Downing-street and accredited 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 1 1 1 

Semblance? but, how do you agree with 
God's Universe and the actual Reality 
of things? 

Past and Present. 

May 25th. 
Indeed what wonders lie in every Day, 
— had we the sight, as happily we have 
not, to decipher: for is not every 
meanest day "the conflux of two Eter- 
nities !" 

French Revolution, 

May 26th. 
Is there a man who pretends to live 
luxuriously housed up ; screened from all 
work, from want, danger, hardship, the 
victory over which is what we name 
work; — he himself to sit serene, amid 
down-bolsters and appliances, and have 
ail his work and battling done by other 



112 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

men? And such man calls himself a 
noh\e-vc\2in ! His fathers worked for 
him, he says ; or successfully gambled for 
him: here he sits; professes, not in sor- 
row but in pride, that he and his have 
done no work, time out of mind. It is 
the law of the land, and is thought to 
be the law of the Universe, that he, alone 
of recorded men, shall have no task laid 
on him, except that of eating his cooked 
victuals, and not flinging himself out of 
window. Once more I will say, there 
was no stranger spectacle ever shown 
under this Sun. 

Past and Present. 

May 2yth. 

Belief is great, life-giving. The his- 
tory of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul- 
elevating, great, so soon as it believes. 

Heroes and Hero Worship, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 113 

May 28th. 
There is one preacher who does preach 
with effect, and gradually persuade all 
persons: his name is Destiny, is Divine 
Providence, and his Sermon the inflex- 
ible Course of Things. Experience does 
take dreadfully high school-wages ; but 
he teaches like no other ! 

Past and Present. 

May 2pth, 
Poor human nature! Is not a man's 
walking, in truth, always that: "a suc- 
cession of falls ?" Man can do no other. 
In this wild element of a Life, he has to 
struggle onwards; now fallen deep- 
abased ; and ever, with tears, repentance, 
with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, 
struggle again still onwards. That this 



114 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

struggle he a faithful unconquerable one : 
that is the question of questions. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

May ^oth. 
The latest Gospel in this world is, 
Know thy work and do it. "Know thy- 
self:" long enough has that poor ''self" 
of thine tormented thee ; thou wilt never 
get to "know" it, I believe! Think it 
not thy business, this of knowing thyself ; 
thou art an unknowable individual : know 
what thou canst work at ; and work at 
it like a Hercules ! That will be thy 
better plan. 

71/03; JJ^/. 

It is most true that all available 
Authority is mystic in its conditions, and 
comes "by the grace of God." 

French Revolution. 



JUNE 



nj 



June 1st. 

Great meanwhile is the moment, when 
tidings of Freedom reach us ; when the 
long-enthralled soul, from amid its 
chains and squalid stagnancy, arises, 
were it still only in blindness and bewil- 
derment, and swears by Him that made 
it, that it will be free! Free? Under- 
stand that well, it is the deep command- 
ment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole 
being, to be free. Freedom is the one 
purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of 
all man's struggles, toilings and suffer- 
ings, in this Earth. Yes, supreme is 
such a moment (if thou have known it) : 
first vision as of a flame-girt Sinai, in 
this our waste Pilgrimage, — which 



ii8 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

thenceforth wants not its pillar of cloud 
by day and pillar of fire by night ! 

French Revolution, 

June 2d. 

Sure enough, of all paths a man could 
strike into, there is, at any given moment, 
a best part for every man ; a thing which, 
here and now, it were of all things wisest 
for him to do ; — which could he be but 
led or driven to do, he were then doing 
*1ike a man," as we phrase it ! all men 
and gods agreeing with him, the whole 
Universe virtually exclaiming Well-done 
to him ! His success, in such case, were 
complete ; his felicity a maximum. This 
path, to find this path and walk in it, is 
the one thing needful for him, Whatso- 
ever forwards him in that, let it come to 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 119 

him even in the shape of blows and 
spurnings, is Hberty: whatsoever hin- 
ders him, were it wardmotes, open-ves- 
tries, poUbooths, tremendous cheers, 
rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery. 

Past and Preseyit. 

June ^d. 

It seems to me a most mournful hy- 
pothesis, that of quackery giving birth 
to any faith, even in savage men. 
Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives 
death to all things. We shall not see 
into the true heart of anything, if we 
look merely at the quackeries of it; if 
we do not reject the quackeries alto- 
gether; as mere diseases, corruptions, 
with which our and all men's sole duty 
is to have done with them, to sweep 



I20 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

them out of our thoughts as out of our 
practice. Man everywhere is the born 
enemy of Hes. 

Heroes and Htro Worship. 

June 4th. 

Veracity, true simpHcity of heart, how 
valuable are these always ! He that 
speaks what \s really in him, will find 
men to listen, though under never such 
impediments. 

Past and Present. 

June ^th. 

Thought, true labour of any kind, 
highest virtue itself, is it not the 
daughter of Pain? Born as out of the 
black whirlwind ; — true effort, in fact, as 
of a captive struggling to free himself: 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 121 

that is Thought. 4n all ways we are ''to 
become perfect through suffering/' 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

June 6th. 
Posterity can do simply nothing for a 
man. 

Past and Present. 

June yth. 
The oak grows silently, in the forest, 
a thousand years ; only in the thousandth 
year, when the woodman arrives with his 
axe, is there heard an echoing through 
the solitude; and the oak announces it- 
self when, with a far-sounding crash, it 
falls. How silent too was the planting 
of the acorn; scattered from the lap of 
some wandering wind ! Nay, when our 
oak flowered, or put on its leaves (its 



122 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

glad Events), what shout of proclama- 
tion could there be? Hardly from the 
most observant a word of recognition. 
These things hefell not, they were slowly 
done; not in an hour, but through the 
flight of days : what was to be said of it ? 
This hour seemed altogether as the last 
was, as the next would be. 

It is thus everywhere that foolish 
Rumour babbles not of what was done, 
but of what was misdone or undone ; and 
foolish History (ever, more or less, the 
written epitomised synopsis of Rumour) 
knows so little that were not as well un- 
known. Attila, Invasions, Walter-the- 
Penniless, Crusades, Sicilian, Vespers, 
Thirty- Years Wars : mere sin and 
misery ; not work, but hindrance of work ! 
For the Earth, all this while, was yearly 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 123 

green and yellow with her kind harvests ; 
the hand of the craftsman, the mind of 
the thinker rested not: and so, after all, 
and in spite of all, we have this so glori- 
ous high-domed blossoming World ; con- 
cerning which poor History may well 
ask, with wonder, Whence it came? 
She knows so little of it, knows so much 
of what obstructed it, what would have 
rendered it impossible. Such, neverthe- 
less, by necessity or foolish choice, is 
her rule and practice; whereby that 
paradox, "Happy the people whose 
annals are vacant," is not without its true 
side. 

French Revolution. 

June 8th. 
Think, would zve believe, and take 
with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, 



124 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

a poetic sport ? Not sport but earnest is 
what we should require. It is a most 
earnest thing to be ahve in this world ; 
to die is not sport for a man. Man's life 
never was a sport to him ; it was a stern 
reality, altogether a serious matter to be 
alive ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

June ptii. 
Valiant Wisdom tilling and draining; 
escorted by owl-eyed Pedantry, by owl- 
ish and vulturish and many other forms 
of Folly ; the valiant husbandman assidu- 
ously tilling: the blind greedy enemy 
too assiduously sowing tares! 

Fast and Present. 

June 1 0th. 
All that he does, and brings to pass, 
is the vesture of a thought. This London 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 1 25 

City, with all its houses, palaces, steam- 
engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasur- 
able traffic and tumult, what is it but a 
Thought, but millions of Thoughts made 
into One; — a huge immeasurable Spirit 
of a Thought^ embodied in brick, in 
iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, 
Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and 
the rest of it! Not a brick was made 
but some man had to think of the mak- 
ing of that brick. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

June nth. 

No sadder proof can be given by a 
man of his own littleness than disbelief 
in great men. There is no sadder symp- 
tom of a generation than such general 
blindness to the spiritual lightning, with 



126 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

faith only in the heap of barren dead 
fuel. It is the last consummation of 
unbelief. In all epochs of the world's 
history, we shall find the Great Man to 
have been the indispensable saviour of 
his epoch ; — the lightnin^:^, without which 
the fuel never would have burnt. The 
History of the World, I said already, 
was the Biography of Great Men. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

June I2th. 

First get your man ; all is got : he can 
learn to do all things, from making boots, 
to decreeing judgments, governing com- 
munities ; and will do them like a man. 
Catch your no-man — alas, have you not 
caught the terriblest Tartar in the world ! 
Perhaps all the terribler, the quieter and 



FROM THOMA S CARLYLE 127 

gentler he looks. For the mischief that 
one blockhead, that every blockhead does, 
in a world so feracious, teeming with 
endless results are ours, no ciphering will 
sum up. 

Past and Present. 

June i^th. 

How delicate, decent English Biogra- 
phy, bless its mealy mouth! A Damo- 
cles' sword of Respectability hangs for- 
ever over the poor English Life-writer 
(as it does over poor English Life in 
general), and reduces him to the verge 
of paralysis. Thus it has been said, 
''There are no English lives worth read- 
ing except those of Players, who by the 
nature of the case have bidden Respect- 
ability good-day." The English biogra- 
pher has long felt that if in writmg his 



128 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Man's Biography, he wrote down any- 
thing that could by possibihty offend any 
man, he had written wrong. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

June 14th. 
The Working Aristocracy must strike 
into a new path ; must understand that 
money alone is not the representative 
either of man's success in the world, or 
of man's duties to man ; and reform their 
own selves from top to bottom, if they 
wish England reformed. 

J^ast and Present. 

June 13th. 
Faults? The greatest of faults, I 
should say, is to be conscious of none. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 1 29 

June i6th. 
When an individual is miserable, what 
does it most of all behove him to do? 
To complain of this man or of that, 
of this thing or of that? To fill the 
world and street with lamentation, 
objurgation? Not so at all; the re- 
verse of so. All moralists advise him 
not to complain of any person or of any 
thing, but of himself only. He is to 
know of a truth that being miserable he 
has been unwise, he. Had he faithfully 
followed Nature and her Laws, Nature, 
ever true to her Laws, would have 
yielded fruit and increase and felicity to 
him: but he has followed other than 
Nature's Laws; and now Nature, her 
patience with him being ended, leaves 
him desolate: answers with very em- 



I30 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

phatic significance to him : No. Not by 
this road, my son ; by another road shalt 
thou attain well-being: this, thou per- 
ceivest is the road to ill-being ; quit this ! 
— So do all moralists advise : that the 
man penitently say to himself first of all, 
Behold I was not wise enough ; I quitted 
the laws of Fact, which are also called 
the Laws of God, and mistook them for 
the Laws of Sham and Semblance, which 
are called the Devil's Laws ; therefore 
am I here ! 

Past and Present. 

June Tph. 

Popularity is as a blaze of illumina- 
tion, or alas, of conflagration, kindled 
round a man ; shozving what is in him ; 
not putting the smallest item more into 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 131 

him ; often abstracting much from him ; 
conflagrating the poor man himself into 
ashes and caput mortuum! 

Sir Walter Scott. 



June i8th. 

A man preaching from his earnest soul 
into the earnest souls of men : is not this 
virtually the essence of all Churches 
whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest, 
reality I say, is preferable to any sem- 
blance, however dignified. Besides, it 
will clothe itself with due semblance by 
and by, if it be real. No fear of that; 
actually no fear at all. Given the living 
man, there will be found clothes for him ; 
he will find himself clothes. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



132 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June igtii. 
I When was a god found ''agreeable" 
to everybody? The regular way is to 
hang, kill, crucify your gods, ?nd execrate 
and trample them under your stupid 
hoofs for a century or two; till you dis- 
cover that they are gods, — and then take 
to braying over them, still in a very long- 
eared manner! 

Past and Prtsent. 

June 20th. 
I say, this is yet the only true morality 
known. A man is right and invincible, 
virtuous and on the road towards sure 
conquest, precisely while he joins him- 
self to the great deep Law of the World, 
in spite of all superficial laws, temporary 
appearances, profit-and-loss calculations ; 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 133 

he is victorious while he cooperates with 
that great central Law, not victorious 
otherwise: — and surely his first chance 
of cooperating with it, or getting into 
the course of it, is to know with his whole 
soul that it is; that it is good, and alone 
good ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

June 2 1 St. 
But indeed Conviction, were it never 
so excellent, is worthless till it convert 
itself into Conduct. Nay properly Con- 
viction is not possible till then ; inasmuch 
as all Speculation is by nature endless, 
formless, a vortex amid vortices : only 
by a felt indubitable certainty of Ex- 
perience does it find any centre to revolve 
round, and so fashion itself into a system. 

Sartor Resartus. 



134 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June 22d. 
Double, double, toil and trouble; that 
is the life of all governors that really 
govern : not the spoil of victory, only the 
glorious toil of battle can be theirs. 

Past and Present. 

June 2jd. 
Has not a deeper meditation taught 
certain of every clime and age, that the 
Where and When, so mysteriously in- 
separable from all our thoughts, are but 
superficial terrestrial adhesions to 
thought; that the Seer may discern them 
where they mount up out of the celestial 
Everywhere and Forever: have not all 
nations conceived their God as Omni- 
present and Eternal ;- as existing in a 
universe Here, an everlasting Now? 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 133 

Think well, thou too wilt find that 
Space is but a mode of our human Sense, 
so likewise Time; there is no Space and 
no Time : We are — we know not what ; 
— light sparkles floating in the aether of 
Deity! 

Sartor Resartus. 



June 24th. 

Is not all work of man in this world a 
making of Order? The carpenter finds 
rough trees; shapes them, constrains 
them into square fitness, into purpose 
and use. We all are born enemies of 
Disorder: it is tragical for us all to be 
concerned in image-breaking and down- 
pulling : for the Great Man, more a man 
than we, it is doubly tragical. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



136 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June 2^th. 
This green flowery rock-built earth, 
the trees, the mountains, rivers, many- 
sounding seas; — that great deep sea of 
azure that swims overhead ; the winds 
sweeping through it; the black cloud 
fashioning itself together, now pouring 
out fire, now hail and rain ; what is it ? 
Ay, what? A' bottom we do not yet 
know; we can never know at all. It is 
not by our superior insight that we 
escape the difficulty ; it is by our superior 
levity, our inattention, our ivant of in- 
sight. It is by not thinking that we cease 
to wonder at it. Hardened round us, 
encasing wholly every notion we form, 
is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, 
mere words. We call that fire of the 
black thunder-cloud ^'electricity," and 



FROM THOMA S CARLYLE 137 

lecture learnedly about it, and grind the 
like of it out of glass and silk : but zvhat 
is it? What made it? Whence comes 
it ? Whither goes it ? Science has done 
much for us ; but it is a poor science that 
would hide from us the great deep sacred 
infinitude of Nescience, whither we can 
never penetrate, on which all science 
swims as a mere superficial film. This 
world, after all our science and sciences, 
is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, 
magical and more, to whosoever will 
think of it. 

Heroes and Hero V/orshif: 

June 26th. 
Foolish men imagine that because 
judgment for an evil thing is delayed^ 
there is no justice, but an accidental one, 



138 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

here below. Judgment for an evil thing 
is many times delayed some day or two, 
some century or two, but it is sure as 
life, it is sure as death! In the centre 
of the world-whirlwind, verily now as 
in the oldest days, dwells and speaks a 
God. 

Past and Present, 

June 2jth. 
Observe, however, that of man's whole 
terrestrial possessions and attainments, 
unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, 
divine or divine-seeming; under which 
he marches and fights, with victorious 
assurance, in his life-battle : what we can 
call his Realized Ideals. Of which real- 
ized ideals, omitting the rest, consider 
only these two: his Church, or spiritual 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 139 

Guidance ; his Kingship, or temporal one. 
The Church : what a word was there ; 
richer than Golconda and the treasures 
of the world! In the heart of the re- 
motest mountains rises the little Kirk; 
the Dead all slumbering round it, under 
their white memorial-stones, "in hope of 
a happy resurrection:" — dull wert thou, 
O Reader, if never in any hour (say of 
moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung 
spectral in the sky, and Being was as if 
swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to 
thee — things unspeakable, that went into 
thy soul's soul. Strong was he that 
had a Church, what we can call a 
Church : he stood thereby, though "in the 
centre of Immensities, in the conflux of 
Eternities," yet manlike towards God and 
man; the vague shoreless Universe had 



I40 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

become for him a firm city, and dwelling 
which he knew. Such virtue was in 
Belief; in these words, well spoken: 1 
believe. Well might men prize their 
Credo, and raise stateliest Temples for 
it, and reverend Hierarchies, and give it 
the tithe of their substance ; it was worth 
living for and dying for. 

French Resolution. 



June jSth. 

No man works save under conditions. 
The sculptor cannot set his own free 
Thought before us ; but his Thought as 
he could translate it into the stone that 
was given with the tools that were 
given. Disjecta membra are all that we 
find of any Poet, or of any man. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 141 

June 2gth. 
Nature, Universe, Destiny, Existence, 
howsoever v^e name this grand unname- 
able Fact in the midst of which we Hve 
and struggle, is as a heavenly bride and 
conquest to the wise and brave, to them 
who can discern her behests and do them ; 
a destroying fiend to them who cannot. 
Answer her riddle, it is well with thee. 
Answer it not, pass on regarding it not, 
it will answer itself; the solution for thee 
is a thing of teeth and claws. 

Past and Present. 

June ^oth. 
But of those decadent ages in which 
no Ideal either grows or blossoms? 
When Belief and Loyalty have passed 
away, and only the cant and false echo of 
them remains; and all Solemnity has 



142 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

become Pageantry; and the Creed of 
ipersons in authority has become one of 
two things: an ImbeciHty or a Macchi- 
avehsm? Alas, of these ages World- 
(History can take no notice ; they have to 
become compressed more and more, and 
finally suppressed in the Annals of Man- 
kind ; blotted out as spurious, — which 
indeed they are. Hapless ages : wherein, 
if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be 
born. To be born, and to learn only, 
by every tradition and example, that 
God's Universe is Belial's and a Lie; and 
''the Supreme Quack" the hierarch of 
men ! In which mournfulest faith, never- 
theless, do we not see whole generations 
(two, and sometimes even three success- 
ively) live, what they call living; and van- 
ish, — without chance of reappearance ? 

French Revolution, 



JULY 



July 1st. 

Nay, instead of shrieking more, it 
were perhaps edifying to remark, on 
the other side, what a singular thing 
Customs (in Latin, Mores) are; and 
how fitly the Virtue, Vir-tus, Manhood 
or Worth, that is in a man, is called 
his Morality, or Customariness. Fell 
Slaughter, one of the most authentic 
products of the Pit you would say, once 
give it Customs, becomes War, with 
Laws of War; and is Customary and 
Moral enough; and red individuals 
carry the tools of it girt round their 
haunches, not without an air of pride, 
— which do thou nowise blame. While, 
see! so long as it is but dressed in 



146 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

hodden and russet; and revolution, less 
frequent than War, has not yet got its 
Laws of Revolution, but the hodden 
or russet individuals are Uncustomary — 
O shrieking beloved brother block- 
heads of Mankind, let us close those 
wide mouths of ours; let us cease 
shrieking, and begin considering! 

French Revolution. 

July 2d. 

Again, what meaning lies in Colour! 
From the soberest drab to the high- 
flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies 
unfold themselves in choice of Colour; 
if the Cut betoken Intellect and Talent, 
so does the Colour betoken Temper 
and Heart. In all which, among na- 
tions as among individuals, there is an 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 147 

incessant, indubitable, though infinitely 
complex working of Cause and Effect; 
every snip of the Scissors has been 
regulated and prescribed by ever-active 
Influences, which doubtless to Intelli- 
gence of a superior order are neither 
invisible nor illegible. 

Sartor Resartus. 

July ^d. 

Deep, far deeper than Supply-and- 
demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred 
as Man's Life itself: these also, if you 
will continue to do work, you shall 
now learn and obey. He that will 
learn them, behold nature is on his 
side, he shall yet work and prosper 
with noble rewards. He that will not 
learn them, Nature is against him; he 



148 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

shall not be able to work in Nature's 
empire, — not in hers. Perpetual mu- 
tiny, contention, hatred, isolation, exe- 
cration shall wait on his footsteps, till 
all men discern that the thing which 
he attains, however golden it look or 
be, is not success, but the want of suc- 
cess. 

Past and Present. 

July 4th. 

Borne over the Atlantic, to the clos- 
ing ear of Louis, King by the Grace of 
God, what sounds are these: muffled, 
ominous new in our centuries ? Bos- 
ton Harbour is black with unexpected 
Tea: behold a Pennsylvania Congress 
gather, and ere long, on Bunker Hill. 
Democracy announcing, in rifle-volleys 



FROM THOMA S CA RL VLB 149 

death winged, under her Star Banner, 
to the tune of Yankee-doodle-doo, that 
she is born, and whirlwind like, will 
envelope the whole earth ! 

French devolution. 

July 5th. 
One monster there is in the world: 
the idle man. What is his " Religion?" 

Past and Present. 

July 6th. 

No nobler feeling than this of admir- 
ation for one higher than himself dwells 
in the breast of man. It is to this 
hour, and at all hours, the vivifying 
influence in man's life. Religion I 
find stand upon it; not Paganism only, 
but far higher and truer religions, — all 
religion hitherto known. Hero-wor- 



I50 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, 
submission, burning, boundless, for a 
noblest godlike Form of Man, — is not 
that the germ of Christianity itself ? 
The greatest of all heroes is One — 
whom we do not name here. Let 
sacred silence meditate that sacred 
matter; you will find it the ultimate 
perfection of a principle extant through- 
out man's whole history on earth. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

July yth. 

Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders, 
and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philos- 
ophies, with the sick ophthalmia and 
hallucination they had brought on, was 
the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly 
present to me; living without God in 



FROM THOMA S CA RL \ ^LE 1 5 1 

the world, of God's light I was not 
utterly bereft ; if my as yet sealed eyes, 
with their unspeakable longing, could 
nowhere see him, nevertheless in my 
heart He was present, and His heaven^ 
written Law still stood legible and 
sacred there. 

Sartor Resartus. 

July 8th. 

We have sumptuous garnitures for 
our Life, but have forgotten to live in 
the middle of them. 

Past and Present. 

July pfh. 

Feudal Fleur-de-lys had become an 
insupportably bad marching banner, 
and needed to be torn and trampled: 
but Moneybag of Mammon (for that. 



152 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

In these times, is what the lespectable 
RepubHc for the Middle Classes will 
signify) is a still worse, while it lasts 
Properly, indeed, it is the worst and 
basest of all banners, and symbols of 
dominion among- men; and indeed is 
possible only in a time of general Athe- 
ism, and Unbelief in any thing save in 
brute Force and Sensualism; pride of 
birth, pride of office, any known kind 
of pride being a degree better than 
purse-pride. 

French Revolution. 

July loth. 

Bribery; have we reflected what 
bribery is ? Bribery means not only 
length of purse, which is neither qual- 
ification nor the contrary for legislating 
well ; but it means dishonesty, and even 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 1 53 



impudent dishonesty; — brazen insensi- 
bility to lying and to making others 
lie; total oblivion, and flinging over- 
board, for the nonce, of any real thing 
you can call veracity, morality; with 
dexterous putting on the cast-clothes 
of that real thing, and strutting about 
in them! 

Past and Present. 

July nth. 
The colours and forms of your light 
will be those of the cut-glass it has to 
shine through. — Curious to think how, 
for every man, any the truest fact is 
modelled by the nature of the man ? 
I said. The earnest man, speaking to 
his brother men, must always have 
stated what seemed to him a fact, a 
real Appearance of Nature. But the 



154 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

way in which such Appearance or fact 
shaped itself, — what sort of fact it be- 
came for him, — was and is modified 
by his own laws of thinking; deep, 
subtle, but universal, ever-operating 
laws. The world of nature, for every 
man, is the Fantasy of Himself; this 
world is the multiplex " Image of his 
own Dream." 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

July I2th. 

It is written, " Many shall run to 
and fro, and knowledge shall be in- 
creased." Surely the plain rule is. Let 
each considerate person have his way, 
and see what it will lead to. For not 
this man and that man, but all men 
make up mankind, and their united 
tasks the tasks of mankind. How 



FROM THOMA S CARLYLE 155 

often have we seen sonue such adven- 
turous, and perhaps much-censured 
wanderer h'ght on some outlying, neg- 
lected, yet vitally momentous province; 
the hidden treasures of which he first 
discovered, and kept proclaiming till 
the general eye and effort were directed 
thither, and the conquest was com- 
pleted; — thereby, in these his seem- 
ingly so aimless rambles, planting new 
standards, founding new habitable col- 
onies, in the immeasurable circumam- 
bient realm of Nothingness and Night? 
Wise man was he v/ho counselled that 
Speculation should have free course, 
and look fearlessly towards all the 
thirty-two points of the compass, 
whithersoever and howsoever it listed. 

Sartor Resartus. 



156 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July isth. 

And so our meetings and our part- 
ings do now end ! The sorrows we 
gave each other; the poor joys we 
faithfully shared, and all our lovings 
and our sufferings, and confused toil- 
ings under the earthly Sun, are over. 
Thou good soul, I shall ne\'er, never 
through all ages of Time, see thee any 
more ! — Never ! O, Reader, knowest 
thou that hard word ? 

French Revolution. 

July 14th. 
To each is given a certain inward 
Talent, a certain outward Environment 
of Fortune; to each, by wisest combi- 
nation of these two, a certain maximum 
of Capability. But the hardest prob- 
lem were ever this first: To find by 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 157 

study of yourself, and of the ground 
you stand on, what your combined in- 
ward and outward Capability specially 
is. For, alas, our young soul is all 
budding with Capabilities, and we see 
not yet which is the main and true one. 
Always too the new man is in a new 
time, under new conditions; his course 
can be the facsimile of no prior one, 
but is by its nature original. 

Sartor Resartus. 

July i^th. 
All human interests, combmed human 
endeavours, and social growths in this 
world, have, at a certain stage of their 
development, required organising: and 
Work, the grandest of human interests, 
does now require it. 

J^ast and Present. 



158 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July i6fh. 
Find a man whose words paint you a 
likeness, you have found a man worth 
something; mark his manner of doing 
it, as very characteristic of him. In the 
first place, he could not have discerned 
the object at all, or seen the vital type 
of it, unless he had, what we may call, 
sympathised with it, — had sympathy in 
him to bestow on objects. He must have 
been sincere about it too; sincere and 
sympathetic : a man without worth can- 
not give you the likeness of any object; 
he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy 
and trivial hearsay, about all objects. 
And indeed may we not say that intellect 
altogether expresses itself in this power 
of discerning what an object is? What- 
soever of faculty a man's mind may have 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 1 59 

will come out here. Is it even of busi- 
ness, a matter to be done? The gifted 
man is he who sees the essential point, 
and leaves all the rest aside as surplus- 
age : it is his faculty too, the man of 
business's faculty, that he can discern 
the true likeness, not the false superficial 
one, of the thing he has got to work in. 
And how much of morality is in the kind 
of insight we get of anything; "the eye 
seeing in all things what it brought with 
it the faculty of seeing!" To the mean 
eye all things are trivial, as certainly as 
to the jaundiced they are yellow. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

July lyth. 

How dare any man, especially a man 
calling himself minister of God, stand 



i6o BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

up in any Parliament or place, under any 
pretext or delusion, and for a day or an 
hour forbid God's Light to come into the 
world, and bid the Devil's Darkness con- 
tinue in it one hour more ! For all light 
and science, under all shapes, in all de- 
grees of perfection, is of God; all dark- 
ness, nescience, is of the Enemy of God. 

Past and Present. 

July i8th. 
O ye Hypocrisies and Speciosities, 
Royal mantles, Cardinal plushcloaks, ye 
Credos, Formulas, Respectabilities, fair- 
painted Sepulchres full of dead men's 
bones, — behold, ye appear to us to be 
altogether a Lie. Yet our Life is not a 
Lie; yet our Hunger and Misery is not 
a Lie! Behold we lift up, one and all, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE i6i 

our Twenty-five million right-hands ; and 
take the Heavens, and the Earth and also 
the Pit of Tophet to witness, that either 
ye shall be abolished, or else we shall be 
abolished ! 

French Revolution, 

July ipth. 
I confess I have no notion of a truly 
great man that could not be all sorts of 
men. The Poet who could merely sit 
on a chair, and compose stanzas, would 
never make a stanza worth much. He 
could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless 
he himself were at least a Heroic warrior 
too. I fancy there is in him the Poli- 
tician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philoso- 
pher: — in one or the other degree, he 
could have been, he is all these. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



i62 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July 20th. 
"What is Justice?" ask many, to whom 
cruel Fate alone will be able to prove 
responsive. It is like jesting Pilate ask- 
ing, What is Truth ? Jesting Pilate had 
not the smallest chance to ascertain what 
was Truth. He could not have known 
it, had a god shown it to him. Thick 
serene opacity, thicker than amaurosis, 
veiled those smiling eyes of his to Truth ; 
the inner retina of them was gone para- 
lytic, dead. He looked at Truth ; and 
discerned her not, there where she stood. 

Past and Present. 

July 2lSt. 
So true it is, what I then said, that 
the Fraction of Life can he increased in 
value not so much by increasing your 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 163 

Numerator as by lessening your Denomi- 
nator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive 
me, Unity itself divided by Zero will 
give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages 
a zero, then ; thou hast the world under 
thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our 
time write : *'It is only with Renunciation 
(Entsagen) that Life, properly speak- 
ing, can be said to begin." 

Sartor Resartus. 

July 2 2d. 
And yet, again, when a man's Formu- 
las become dead; as all Formulas, in the 
progress of living growth, are very sure 
to do! When the poor man's integu- 
ments, no longer nourished from within, 
become dead skin, mere adscititious 
leather and callosity, wearing thicker 



1 64 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

and thicker, uglier and uglier, till no 
heart any longer can be felt beating 
through them, so thick, callous, calcified 
are they; and all over it has now 
grown mere calcified oyster-shell, or 
were it polished mother-of-pearl, in- 
wards almost to the very heart of the 
poor man : — yes then, you may say, 
his usefulness once more is quite ob- 
structed ; once more, he cannot go abroad 
and do business in the world ; it is time 
that he take to bed and prepare for de- 
parture which cannot now be distant ! 
IJhl homines sunt modi sunt. 

Past and Present. 

July 2^d. 
Men's w^ords are a poor exponent of 
their thought ; nay their thought itself is 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 165 

a poor exponent of the inward unnamed 
Mystery, wherefrom both thought and 
action have their birth. No man can 
explain himself, can get himself ex- 
plained; men see not one another but 
distorted phantasms which they call one 
another ; which they hate and go to battle 
with : for all battle is well said to be mis- 
understanding. 

French Revolution. 

July 24th. 
Such I hold to be the genuine use of 
Gunpowder: that it makes all men alike 
tall. Nay, if thou be cooler, cleverer 
than I, if thou have more Mind, though 
all but no Body whatever, then canst 
thou kill me first, and art the taller. 
Hereby, at last, is the Goliath powerless, 



166 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

and the David resistless ; savage Animal- 
ism is nothing, inventive Spiritualism is 
all. 

Sartor Resartus. 

July 25th. 
Life is figured by them as a Tree. 
Igdrasil, the Ash-Tree of Existence, 
has its roots deep down in the kingdoms 
of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up 
heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the 
whole Universe : it is the Tree of Exist- 
ence. At the foot of it, in the Death- 
kingdom, sit Three Nomas, Fates, — 
the Past, Present, Future ; watering its 
roots from the Sacred Well. Its 
''boughs," with their buddings and dis- 
leafings, — events, things suffered, things 
done, catastrophes, — stretch through all 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 167 



lands and times. Is not every leai of it 
a biography, every fibre there an act or 
word? Its boughs are Histories of 
Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of 
Human Existence onwards from of old. 
It grows there, the breath of Human 
Passion rustling through it; — or storm- 
tost, the stormwind howling through it 
like the voice of all the gods. It is Ig- 
drasil, the Tree of Existence. It is the 
past, the present, and the future; what 
was done, what is doing, what wnll be 
done; ''the infinite conjugation of the 
verb To do." Considering how human 
things circulate, each inextricably in 
communion with all, — how the word I 
speak to you to-day is borrowed, not 
from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from 
ail men since the first man began to 



i6S BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

speak, — I find no similitude so true as 
this of a Tree. Beautiful ; altogether 
beautiful and great. The "Machine of 
the Universe," — alas, do but think of 
that in contrast! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

July 26th. 
All visible things are Emblems ; what 
thou seest is not there on its own ac- 
count ; strictly taken, is not there at all : 
Matter exists only spiritually, and to 
represent some Idea, and body it forth. 

Sartor Resartus. 

July 2/th. 

Enjoying things that are pleasant ; 

that is not the evil ; it is the reducing 

of our moral self to slavery by them that 

is. Let a man assert wilhal that he is 



FROM THOMA S CA RL VLB 1 69 

king over his habitudes ; that he could 
and would shake them off, on cause 
shown : this is an excellent law. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

July 28th. 
Not in having ''no business" with men, 
but in having no unjust busfness with 
them, and in haz'ing all manner of true 
and just business, can either his or their 
blessedness be found possible, and this 
waste world become, for both parties, a 
home and peopled garden. 

Pas^ and Present. 

July 2Qth. 
' The first spiritual want of a barbarous 
man is Decoration. 

Sartor Res art us. 



I70 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July jotli. 
Labour must become a seeing rational 
giant, with a soul in the body of him, 
and take his place on the throne of things, 
— leaving his Mammonism, and several 
other adjuncts, on the lower steps of 
said throne. 

Fast atid Present 

July ^ISt. 
Mystical, more than magical, is that 
Communion of Soul with Soul, both 
looking heavenward : here properly Soul 
first speaks with Soul ; for only in look- 
ing heavenward, take it in what sense 
you may, not in looking earthward, does 
what we can call Union, mutual Love, 
Society, begin to be possible. 

Sartor Resartus. 



AUGUST 



August 1st. 
What a man kens he cans. But the 
beginning of a man's doom is that vision 
be withdrawn from him; that he sees 
not the reahty, but a false spectrum of 
the reahty; and, following that, step 
darkly, with more or less velocity, down- 
wards to the utter Dark ; to Ruin, which 
is the great Sea of Darkness, whither all 
falsehoods, winding or direct, continu- 
ally flow. 

French Revolution, 

August 2d. 

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful 

to consider that we not only carry each a 

future Ghost within him ; but are, in very 

deed. Ghosts! These Limbs, whence 



174 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

had we them ; this stormy Force ; this 
hfe-blood with its burning Passion? 
They are dust and shadow; a shadow- 
system gathered round our Me ; wherein, 
through some moments or years the 
Divine Essence is to be revealed in the 
Flesh. That warrior on his strong war- 
horse, fire flashes through his eyes ; force 
dwells in his arm and heart : but warrior 
and war-horse are a vision ; a revealed 
Force, nothing more. 

Sartor Resartus. 

August ^d. 
This Universe, ah me — what could the 
wild man know of it ; what can we yet 
know? That it is a Force and Thous- 
andfold Complexity of Forces ; a Force 
which is not we. That is all; it is not 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 175 

we, it is altogether different from us. 
Force, Force, everywhere Force ; we our- 
selves a mysterious Force in the centre 
of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on 
the highway but has Force in it : how else 
could it rot ?" Nay surely, to the Atheis- 
tic Thinker, if such a one were possible, 
it must be a miracle too, this huge illimit- 
able whirlwind of Force, which envelops 
us here; never-resting whirlwind, high 
as Immensity, old as Eternity. What is 
it? God's creation, the religious people 
answer ; it is the Almighty God's ! Athe- 
istic science babbles poorly of it, with 
scientific nomenclatures, experiments and 
what-not, as if it were a poor dead thing, 
to be bottled-up in Leyden jars and sold 
over counters: but the natural sense of 
man, in ?.ll times, if he will earnestly 



176 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

apply his sense, proclaims it to be a liv- 
ing thing, — ah, an unspeakable, god-like 
thing; towards which the best attitude 
for us, after never so much science, is 
awe, devout prostration and humility of 
soul; worship if not in words, then in 
silence. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

August 4th. 

Your cotton-spinning and thrice- 
miraculous mechanism, what is this too, 
by itself, but a larger kind of Animalism ? 
Spiders can spin, Beavers can build, and 
show contrivance ; the Ant lays up accu- 
mulation of capital, and has, for aught 
I know, a Bank of Antland. If there 
is no soul in man higher than all that, 
did it reach to sailmg on the cloud-rack 



FROJVr THOMAS CARLYLE 177 

and spinning sea-sand ; then I say, man 
is but an animal, a more cunning kind of 
brute : he has no soul. 

Past and Present. 

August ^th. 
Without hands a man might have feet, 
and could still walk; but, consider it, 
without morality, intellect were impossi- 
ble for him ; he could not know anything 
at all ! To know a thing, what we can 
call knowing, a man must hrst love the 
Ithing, sympathise with it: that is, be 
virtuously related to it. If he have not 
the justice to put down his own selfish- 
ness at every turn, the courage to stand 
by the dangerous-true at every turn> how 
shall he know? His virtues, all of them, 
will lie recorded in his knowledge. Na- 



1 73 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ture, with her truth, remains to the bad, 
to the selfish and pusillanimous forever 
a sealed book : what such can know of 
Nature is mean, superficial small ; for the 
uses of the day merely. But does not 
the very Fox know somethingof Nature? 
Exactly so: it knows where the geese 
lodge ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

August 6th. 
But on the whole does not TntE en- 
velop this present National Convention ; 
as it did those Brennuses, and ancient 
August Senates in felt breeches? Time 
surely; and also Eternity. Dim dusk 
of Time, — or noon which will be dusk ; 
and then there is night, and silence ; and 
Time with all its sick noises is swallowed 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 179 

in the still sea. Pity thy brother, O Son 
of Adam ! The angriest frothy jargon 
that he utters, is it not properly the 
whimpering of an infant which cannot 
speak what ails it, but is in distress 
clearly, in the inwards of it ; and so must 
squall and whimper continually, till its 
Mother take, and it get — to sleep ! 

French devolution. 

'August yth. 
Among the rainbow colours that 
glowed on my horizon, lay even in child- 
hood a dark ring of Care, as yet no 
thicker than a thread, and often quite 
overshone ; yet always it reappeared, nay 
ever waxing broader and broader; till 
in after-years it almost overshadowed my 
whole canopy, and threatened to engulf 



i8o BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

me in final night. It was the ring of 
Necessity, whereby we all are begirt; 
happy he for whom a kind heavenly Sun 
brightens it into a ring of Duty, and 
plays round it with beautiful prismatic 
diffractions ; yet ever, as basis and as 
bourne for our whole being, it is there. 

Sarlor Resartus. 



August StJl. 
The Bucanier strikes down a man, 
a hundred or a million men : but what 
profits it? He has one enemy never to 
be struck down ; nay two enemies : Man- 
kind and the Maker of Men. On the 
great scale or on the small, in fighting 
of men or fighting of difficulties, I will 
not embark my venture with How^el 
Davies : It is not the Bucanier, it is the 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE i8i 

Hero only that can gain victory, that can 
do more than seem to succeed. These 
things will deserve meditating; for they 
apply to all battle and soldiership, all 
struggle and effort whatsoever in this 
Fight of Life. 

Past and Present. 

August pth. 
That stifled hum of Midnight, when 
Traffic has lain down to rest; and the 
chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling 
here and there through distant streets, 
are bearing her to Halls roofed in, and 
lighted to the due pitch for her ; and only 
Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan 
like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum, I 
say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber 
of sick Life, is heard in Heaven ! 

Sartor Resartus. 



1 82 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

August lOth. 
To shriek, we say, when certain things 
are acted, is proper and unavoidable. 
Nevertheless, articulate speech, not 
shrieking, is the faculty of man : when 
speech is not yet possible, let there be, 
with the shortest delay, at least — silence. 

Frtncli Revolution. 

August nth. 
For the gowns of learned-sergeants 
are good : parchment records, fixed 
forms, and poor terrestrial Justice, with 
or without horse-hair, what sane man 
will not reverence these? And yet, be- 
hold, the man is not sane but insane, 
who considers these alone as venerable. 
Oceans of horse-hair, continents of 
parchment, and learned-sergeant elo- 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 183 

quence, were it continued till the learned 
tongue wore itself small in the indefati- 
gable learned mouth, cannot make unjust 
just. The grand question still remains, 
Was the judgment just? If unjust, it 
will not and cannot get harbour for 
itself, or continue to have footing in this 
Universe, which was made by other than 
One Unjust. 

Past and Present. 

August I2th. 
In Death too, in the Death of the Just, 
as the last perfection of a Work of Art, 
may we not discern symbolic meaning? 
In that divinely transfigured Sleep, as of 
Victory, resting over the beloved face 
which now knows thee no more, read 
(if thou canst for tears) the confluence 



1 84 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

of Time with Eternity, and some t(leam 
of the latter peering through. 

Sartor Resartus. 



August ijth. 
What indeed are faculties? We talk 
of faculties as if they were distinct, 
things separable; as if a man had intel- 
lect, Imagination, fancy, &c., as he has 
hands, feet and arms. That is a capital 
error. Then again, we hear of a man's 
"intellectual nature." and of his "moral 
nature," as these again were divisible, 
and existed apart. Necessities of lan- 
guage do indeed require us so to speak : 
we must speak. I am aware, in this way, 
if we are to speak at all. But words 
ought not to harden into things for us. 
It seems to me, our apprehension of this 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 185 

matter is, for most part, radically falsi- 
fied thereby. We ought to know withal, 
and to keep forever in mind, that these 
divisions are at bottom but names; that 
man's spiritual nature, the vital Force 
which dwells in him, is essentially one 
and indivisible ; that what we call imagi- 
nation, fancy, understanding, and so 
forth, are but different figures of the 
same Power of Insight, all indissolubly 
connected with each other, physiognomi- 
cally related; that if we knew one of 
them we might know all of them. Moral- 
ity itself, what we call the moral quality 
of a man, what is this but another side 
of the one Vital Force whereby he is and 
works ? All that a man does is physiog- 
nomical of him. You may see hozv a 
man would fight, by the way in which he 



i86 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



sings; Jus courage, or zcaiit of courage, 
is visible in the word lie utters, in the 
opinion he has formed, no less than in 
the stroke he strikes. He is one; aiid 
preaches the same Self abroad in all 
these Zi'ays. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

"August 14th. 
"Well, also," says he elsewhere, "was 
it written by Theologians : a King rules 
by divine right. He carries in him an 
authority from God, or man will never 
give it him. Can I choose my own King ? 
I can choose my own King Popinjay, 
and play what farce or tragedy I may 
with him : but he who is to be my Ruler, 
whose will is to be higher than my will, 
was chosen for me in Heaven. Neither 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 187 

except in such Obedience to the Heaven- 
chosen is Freedom so much as conceiv- 
able." 

Sartor Resartus. 

August 15th. 
This business of Louis looks altogether 
different now, as seen over Seas and at 
the distance of forty-four years, than it 
looked then, in France, and struggling, 
confused all round one ! For indeed it 
is a most lying thing that same Past 
Tense always : so beautiful, sad, almost 
Elysian-sacred, "in the moonlight of 
Memory," it seems ; and seems only. For 
observe : always, one most important 
element is surreptitiously (we not notic- 
mg it) withdrawn from the Past Time: 
the haggard element of Fear ! Not there 



1 88 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

does Fear dwell, nor Uncertainty, nor 
Anxiety; but it dwells here; haunting 
us, tracking us ; running like an accursed 
ground-discord through all the music- 
tones of our Existence ; — making the 
Tense a more Present one ! Just so is it 
with this of Louis. Why smite the 
fallen? asks Magnanimity, out of danger 
now. 

French Revolution. 

' August 1 6th. 
Thus does the Conscience of man pro- 
ject itself athwart whatsoever of knowl- 
edge or surmise, of imagination, under- 
standing, faculty, acquirement, or natural 
disposition he has in him ; and, hke light 
through coloured glass, paint strange 
pictures "on the rim of the horizon" 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 189 



and elsewhere ! Truly this same "sense 
of the Infinite nature of Duty" is the 
central part of all with us ; a ray as of 
Eternity and Immortality, immured in 
dusky many-coloured Time, and its 
deaths and births. Your ''coloured glass" 
varies so much from century to century ; 
— and, in certain money-making, game- 
preserving centuries, it gets so terribly 
opaque ! Not a Heaven with cherubim 
surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant 
leaden-coloured Hell. One day it will 
again cease to be opaque, this ''coloured 
glass." Nay, may it not become at once 
translucent and w/icoloured? Painting 
no Pictures more for us, but only the 
everlasting Azure itself? That will be 
a right glorious consummation! 

Past and Present. 



190 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

August i/th. 

"Truth," I cried, "though the Heavens 
crush nie for following her: no False- 
hood ! though a whole celestial Lubber- 
land were the price of Apostacy." 

Sartor Resartus. 



August i8th. 

It is a calumny on men to say that they 
are aroused to heroic action by ease, hope 
of pleasure, recompense — sugar-plums 
of any kind, in this world or the next ! 
In the meanest mortal there lies some- 
thing nobler. The poor swearing sol- 
dier, hired to be shot, has his "honour 
of a soldier," different from drill-regu- 
lations and the shilling a day. It is not 
to taste sweet things, but to do noble and 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 191 

true things, and vindicate himself under 
God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that 
the poorest Son of Adam dimly longs. 
Show him the way of doing that, the 
dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. 
They wrong man greatly who say he is 
to be seduced by ease. DifiBculty, abne- 
gation, martyrdom, death are the allure- 
ments that act on the heart of man. 
Kindle the inner genial life of him, you 
have a flame that burns-up all lower con- 
siderations. Not happiness, but some- 
thing higher: one sees this even in the 
frivolous classes, with their "point of 
honour" and the like. Not by flattering 
our appetites ; no, by awakening the 
Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can 
any Religion gain followers. 

Heroes and Hero Worship, 



192 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

August igih. 

"Custom," continues the Professor, 
"doth make dotards of us all. Consider 
well, thou wilt find that Custom is the 
greatest of Weavers ; and weaves air- 
raiment for all the Spirits of the Uni- 
verse ; whereby indeed these dwell with 
us visibly, as ministering servants, in 
our houses and workshops * but their 
spiritual nature becomes, to the most, for 
ever hidden. Philosophy complains that 
Custom has hoodwinked us, from the 
first ; that we do every thing by Custom, 
even Believe by it ; that our very Axioms, 
let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, 
are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we 
have never heard questioned. Nay, what 
is Philosophy throughout but a continual 
battle against Custom ; an ever-renewed 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 193 

effort to transcend the sphere of blind 
Custom, and so become Transcendental ?" 

Sartor Resartus. 

August 20th. 
It has been written, ''An endless sig- 
nificance lies in Work;" a man perfects 
himself by working. Foul jungles are 
cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, 
and stately cities; and withal the man 
himself first ceases to be a jungle and 
foul unwholesome desert thereby. Con- 
sider how, even in the meanest sort of 
Labour, the whole soul of a man is com- 
posed into a kind of real harmony, the 
instant he sets himself to work! 

Pasi and Present. 
August 2 1 St. 
Living! Little knowest thou what 
alchemy is in an inventive Soul ; how, as 



194 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

with its little finger, it can create pro- 
vision enough for the body (of a Phil- 
osopher) ; and then, as with both hands, 
create quite other than provision ; namely, 
spectres to torment itself withal. 

Sartor Resartus. 

August 2 2d. 
All substances clothe themselves in 
forms : but there are suitable true forms, 
and then there are untrue unsuitable. As 
the briefest definition, one might say, 
Forms which groiv round a substance, 
if we rightly understand that, will cor- 
respond to the real nature and purport 
of it, will be true, good ; forms which are 
consciously put round a substance, bad. 
I invite you to reflect on this It distin- 
guishes true from false in Ceremonial 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 195 

Form, earnest solemnity from empty 
pageant, in all human things. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

August 2^d. 
Law is our father and mother, whom 
we will not dishonour ; but Patriotism is 
our own soul. 

French Revolution. 

August 24th. 
Dupes indeed are many: but, of all 
dupes, there is none so fatally situated 
as he who lives in an undue terror of 
being duped. The world does exist ; the 
world has truth in it, or it would not 
exist! First recognize what Is true, we 
shall then discern what is false, and 
properly never till then. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



196 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

August 2jtll, 
/ To whom, then, is this wealth of 

England wealth? Who is it that it 
blesses; makes happier, wiser, beauti- 
fuller, in any way better? Who has got 
hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for 
him, like a true servant, not like a false 
mock-servant ; to do him any real ser- 
vice whatsoever? As yet no one. 

Past and Present. 

August 26th. 
There must be a veracity, a natural 
spontaneity in forms. In the commonest 
meeting of men, a person making, what 
we call, ''set speeches," is not he an 
offense? In the mere drawing-room, 
whatsoever courtesies you see to be grim- 
aces, prompted by no spontaneous reality 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 197 

within, are a thing you wish to get away 
from. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

August 2yth. 
Produce ! Produce ! Were it but the 
pitifulest infinitesimal fraction of a Pro- 
duct, produce it in God's name! 'Tis 
the utmost that thou hast in thee; out 
with it then. Up, up ! Whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole 
might. Work while it is called To-day, 
for the Night cometh wherein no man 
can work. 

Pasf and Present. 

August 28th. 

What then is this Thing, called La 

Revolution, which, like an Angel of 

Death, hangs over France, noyading, 



198 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

fusillating, fighting, gun-boring, tanning 
human skins ? La Revolution is but so 
many Alphabetic Letters ; a thing no- 
where to be laid hands on, to be clapt 
under lock and key : where is it? what is 
it? It is the Madness that dwells in the 
hearts of men. In this man it is, and in 
that man ; as a rage or as a terror, it is in 
all men. Invisible, impalpable ; and yet 
no black Azrael, with wings spread over 
half a continent, with sword sweeping 
from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality. 

French Revolution. 

August 2Qth. 

The inventive genius of great England 

will not forever sit patient with mere 

wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and 

billy-rollers whirring in the head of it 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 199 

The inventive genius of England is not 
a Beaver's, or a Spinner's, or Spider's 
genius : it is a Man's genius I hope, with 
a God over him! 

Past and Present. 

/ August ^oth. 

And yet, I say, there is an irrepressi- 
ble tendency in every man to develop 
himself according to the magnitude 
which Nature has made him of ; to speak 
out, to act out, what Nature has laid in 
him. This is proper, fit, inevitable ; nay, 
it is a duty, and even the summary of 
duties for a man. The meaning of life 
here on earth might be defined as con- 
sisting in this: To unfold your self, to 
work what thing you have the faculty 
for. It is a necessity for the human 
being, the first law of our existence. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



20O BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

August ^ist. 
Who can hinder it ; who is there that 
can clutch into the wheel-spokes of Des- 
tiny, and say to the Spirit of Time : Turn 
back, I command thee? — Wiser were it 
that we yielded to the Inevitable and 
Inexorable, and accounted even this the 
best. 

Sartor Resartus. 



SEPTEMBER 



September isf. 
That the French Nation has believed, 
for several years now, in the possibility, 
nay certainty and near advent, of a uni- 
versal Millenium, or reign of Freedom, 
Equality, Fraternity, wherein man should 
be the brother of man, and sorrow and 
sin flee away? Not bread to eat, nor 
soap to wash with ; and the reign of per- 
fect Felicity ready to arrive, due always 
since the Bastile fell! How did our 
hearts burn within us, at the Feast of 
Pikes, when brother flung himself on 
brother's bosom; and in sunny jubilee, 
Twenty- five millions burst forth into 
sound and cannon-smoke! Bright was 
our Hope then, as sunlight; red-angry 
is our Flope grown now, as consuming 



204 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

fire. But, O Heavens, what enchant- 
ment is it, or devehsh legerdemain, of 
such effect, that Perfect FeHcity, always 
within arm's length could never be laid 
hold of, but only in her stead Contro- 
versy and Scarcity ? This set of traitors 
after that set I Tremble, ye traitors; 
dread a People which calls itself patient, 
long-suffering; but which cannot always 
submit to have its pocket picked, in this 
way, — of a Millenium ! 

French Revolution. 

September 2d. 
How a man, of some wide thing that 
he has witnessed, will construct a narra- 
tive, what kind of picture and delineation 
he will give of it, — is the best measure 
you could get of what intellect is in the 
man. Which circumstance is vital and 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 205 

shall stand prominent; which unessen- 
tial, fit to be suppressed; where is the 
true beginning, the true sequence and 
ending? To find out this you task the 
whole force of insight that is in the man. 
He must understand the thing; accord- 
ing to the depth of his understanding, 
will the fitness of his answer be. You 
will try him so. Does like join itself to 
like ; the spirit of method stir in that con- 
fusion, so that its embroilment becomes 
order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let 
there be light ; and out of chaos make a 
world? Precisely as there is light in 
himself, will he accomplish this. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

September ^d. 
Our Wilderness is the Wide World 
in an Atheistic Century ; our Forty Days 



2o6 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

are long years of suffering and fasting: 
nevertheless, to these also comes an end. 
Yes, to me also was given, if not the Vic 
tory, yet the consciousness of Battle, and 
the resolve to persevere therein while 
life or faculty is left. To me. also, en- 
tangled in the enchanted forests, demon- 
peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, 
it was given, after weariest wanderings, 
to work out my way into the higher sun- 
lit slopes — of that Mountain which has 
no summit, or whose summit is in 
Heaven only ! 

Sartor Resartus. 



September 4th. 

Hast thou looked on the Potter's 
wheel, — one of the venerablest objects; 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 207 

old as the Prophet Ezechiel and far older? 
Rude lumps of clay,how they spin them- 
selves up, by mere quick whirling, into 
beautiful circular dishes. And fancy 
the most assiduous Potter, but without 
his wheel ; reduced to making dishes, or 
rather amorphous botches, by mere 
kneading and baking! Even such a 
Potter were Destiny, with a human soul 
that would rest and lie at ease, that would 
not work and spin! Of an idle unre- 
volving man the kindest Destiny, like the 
most assiduous Potter without wheel, 
can bake and knead nothing other than 
a botch; let her spend on him what ex- 
pensive colouring, what gilding and 
enamelling she will, he is but a botch. 
Not a dish; not a bulging, kneaded, 
crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, 



2o8 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

amorphous botch, — a mere enamelled 
vessel of dishonour ! Let the idle think 
of this. 

Past and Present. 

September ^th. 
Alas then, is man's civilization only a 
wrappage, through which the savage 
nature of him can still burst, infernal as 
ever ? Nature still makes him ; and has 
an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial. 

French Revolution. 

September 6th. 
But that an Infinite of Practical Im- 
portance, speaking with strict arithmeti- 
cal exactness, an Infinite, has vanished 
or can vanish from the Life of any Man: 
this thou shalt not believe! O brother, 
the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 209 

did it not at any moment disclose itself 
to thee, indubitable, unnameable ? Came 
it never, like the gleam of pretermitural 
eternal Oceans, like the voice of old 
Eternities, farsounding through thy heart 
of hearts? Never? Alas, it was not 
thy Liberalism then ; it was thy Animal- 
ism ! The Infinite is most sure than any 
other fact. 

Pasf and Present. 

September yth. 
It is not because of his toils that I 
lament for the poor: we must all toil, 
or steal (howsoever we name our steal- 
ing), which is worse; no faithful work- 
man finds his task a pastime. The poor 
is hungry and athirst; but for him also 
there is food and drink : he is heavy-laden 
and weary ; but for him also the Heavens 



2IO BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



send Sleep, and of the deepest ; in his 
smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of Rest 
envelops him. and fitful glitterings of 
cloud-skirted Dreams. But what I do 
mourn over is, that the lamp of his soul 
should go out ; that no ray of heavenly, 
or even of earthly knowledge, should 
visit him ; but, only in the haggard dark- 
ness, like two spectres, Fear and Indig- 
nation. 

Sartor Resartus. 

September 8th. 
These old St. Edmundsbury walls, I 
say, were not peopled with fantasms ; but 
with men of flesh and blood, made alto- 
gether as we are. Had thou and I then 
been, who knows but we ourselves had 
taken refuge from an evil Time, and fled 
to dwell here, and meditate on an Eter- 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 211 

nity, in such fashion as we could ? Alas, 
how like an old osseous fragment, a 
broken blackened shin-bone of the old 
dead Ages, this black ruin looks out, not 
yet covered by the soil ; still indicating 
what a once gigantic Life lies buried 
there ! It is dead now, and dumb ; but 
was alive once, and spake. For twenty 
generations, here was the earthly arena 
where painful living men worked out 
their life-wrestle, — looked at by Earth, 
by Heaven and Hell. Bells tolled to 
prayers; and men, of many humours, 
various thoughts, chanted vespers, ma- 
tins ; — and round the little islet of their 
life rolled forever (as round ours still 
rolls, though we are blind and deaf) the 
illimitable Ocean, tinting all things with 
its eternal hues and reflexes; making 



212 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

strange prophetic music! How silent 
now ; all departed, clean gone. The 
World-Dramaturgist has written: Ex- 
eunt. 

Past and Present. 

September gtJi. 
So many centuries, say only from 
Hugh Capet downwards, had been add- 
ing together, century transmitting it with 
increase to century, the sum of Wicked- 
ness, of Falsehood, Oppression of man 
by man. Kings were sinners, and Priests 
were, and People. Open-Scoundrels 
rode triumphant, bediademed, becoro- 
netted, bemitred ; or the still fataller 
species of Secret-Scoundrels, in their 
fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, re- 
spectabilities, hollow within : the race of 
Quacks was grown many as the sands of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 213 

the sea. Till at length such a sum of 
Quackery had accumulated itself as, in 
brief, the Earth and the Heavens were 
weary of Slow seemed the Day of 
Settlement : coming on, all imperceptible, 
across the bluster and fanfaronade of 
Courtierisms, Conquering - Heroisms, 
Most-Christian Grand Monarque-isms, 
Well-beloved Pompadourisms : yet be- 
hold it was always coming; behold it 
has come, suddenly, unlooked for by any 
man ! The harvest of long centuries was 
ripening and whitening so rapidly of 
late; and now it is grown white, and is 
reaped rapidly, as it were, in one day. 
Reaped in this Reign of Terror; and 
carried home, to Hades and the Pit! — 
Unhappy Sons of Adam : it is ever so ; 
and never do they know it, nor will they 



214 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

know it. With clieerfully smoothed 
countenances, day after day, and genera- 
tion after generation, they, calHng cheer- 
fully to one another, *'Well-speed-ye," 
are at work, soianng the wind. And yet, 
as God Hves, they shall reap the zvhirl- 
wind: no other thing, we say, is possible, 
— since God is Truth and His World is 
a Truth. 

French devolution. 

September loth. 
Happily no bygone German, or man, 
rises again ; thus the Present is not need- 
lessly trammelled with the Past ; and only 
grows out of it, like a Tree, whose roots 
are not intertangled with its branches, 
but lie peaceably under ground. Nay, 
it is very mournful, yet not useless, to 
see and know, how the Greatest and 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 215 



Dearest, in a short while, would find his 
place quite filled up here, and no room 
for him: the very Napoleon, the very 
Byron, in some seven years, has become 
obsolete, and were now a foreigner to 
his Europe. Thus is the Law of Prog- 
ress secured; and in Clothes, as in all 
other external things whatsoever, no 
fashion will continue. 

Sartor Resartus. 

September nth. 
The craftsman there, the smith with 
that metal of his, with these tools, with 
these cunning methods, — how little of 
all he does is properly his work! All 
past inventive men work with him: — as 
indeed with all of us, in all things. 
Dante is the spokesman of the Middle 
Ages ; the Thought they lived by stands 



2i6 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

here, in everlasting music. These sub- 
lime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, 
are the fruit of the Christian Meditation 
of all the good men who had gone 
before him. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

September 12th. 
Sublimer in this world know I nothing 
than a Peasant Saint, could such now 
any where be met with. Such a one will 
take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou 
wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring 
forth from the humblest depths of Earth, 
like a light shining in great darkness. 

Sartor Resartus. 

September i^th. 

A man m no case has liberty to tell lies 
It had been, in the long run, better for 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 217 



Napoleon too if he had not told any. In 
fact, if a man have any purpose reaching 
beyond the hour and day, meant to be 
found extant next day, what good can it 
ever be to promulgate lies ? The lies are 
found out ; ruinous penalty is exacted for 
them. No man will believe the liar next 
time even when he speaks truth, when 
it is of the last importance that he be 
believed. The old cry of wolf!— A lie 
is wo-thing ; you cannot of nothing make 
something; you make nothing at last 
and lose your labour into the bargain. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



September 14th. 

But how is it then with that Vengeur 
Ship, she neither strikes nor makes off? 



218 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

She is lamed, she cannot make off ; strike 
she will not. Fire rakes her fore and 
aft, from victorious enemies ; the Ven- 
geur is sinking. Strong are ye, Tyrants 
of the Sea ; yet we also, are we weak ? 
Lo ! all flags, steamers, jacks, every rag 
of tricolor that will yet run on rope, fly 
rustling aloft : the whole crew crowds to 
the upper deck ; and, with universal soul- 
maddening yell, shouts Vive la R^pub- 
lique, — sinking, sinking. She staggers, 
she lurches, her last drunk whirl ; Ocean 
yawms abysmal : down rushes the Veii- 
guer, carrying Vive la Rcpiiblique along 
with her, unconquerable into Eternity! 
Let foreign Despots think of that. There 
is an Unconquerable in man, when he 
stands on his Rights of Man : let Despots 
and Slaves and all people know this, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 219 

and only them that stand on the Wrongs 
of Man tremble to know it. 

French Revolution. 

September 15th 
To shape the whole future is not our 
problem ; but only to shape faithfully a 
small part of it, according to rules al- 
ready known. It is perhaps possible for 
each of us, who will with due earnestness 
inquire, to ascertain clearly what he, for 
his own part, ought to do: this let him, 
with true heart, do, and continue doing. 
The general issue will, as it has always 
done, rest well with a Higher Intelli- 
gence than ours. 

Pasi and Present. 

September 16th. 
Hast thou ever meditated on that word 
Tradition : how we inherit not Life only. 



220 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

but all the garniture and form of Life; 
and work, and speak, and even think and 
feel, as our Fathers, and primeval grand- 
fathers, from the beginning have given 
it us? 

Sartor Resartus. 

September lyth. 
They were Poets too, that devised all 
those graceful courtesies which make 
life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood 
or grimace ; it need not be such. And 
Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are 
still possible; nay still inevitable. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

September i8th. 
Hast thou not Greek enough to imder- 
stand thus much : The end of Man is in 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 221 

Action, and not a Thought, though it 
were the noblest? 

Sartor Resartus. 

September i^th. 
But our work, — behold that is not 
abolished, that has not vanished: our 
work, behold, it remains, or the want of 
it remains ; — for endless Times and Eter- 
nities, remains ; and that is now the sole 
question with us forevermore ! Brief 
brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, 
its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone ; 
and divine everlasting Night, with her 
star-diadems, with her silences and her 
veracities, is come! What hast thou 
done, and how? Happiness, Unhappi- 
ness: all that was but the wages thou 
hadst ; thou hast spent all that, in sustain- 



222 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ing thyself hitherward ; not a coin of it 
remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten : 
and now thy work, where is thy work? 
Swift, out with it, let us see thy work! 

Past and Present. 



September 20th. 

For a man, once committed headlong 
to republican or any other Transcenden- 
talism, and fighting and fanaticising 
amid a Nation of his like, becomes as it 
were enveloped in an ambient atmosphere 
of Transcendentalism and Delirium: his 
individual self is lost in something that 
is not himself, but foreign though in- 
separable from him. Strange to think 
of, the man's cloak still seems to hold the 
same man : and yet the man is not there. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 223 

his volition is not there ; nor the source 
of what he will do and devise ; instead of 
the man and his volition there is a piece 
of Fanaticism and Fatalism incarnated 
in the shape of him. He, the hapless 
incarnated Fanaticism, goes his road ; no 
man can help him, he himself least of all. 
It is a wonderful tragical predicament; 
— such as human language, unused to 
deal with these things, being contrived 
for the uses of common life, struggles 
to shadow out in figures. The ambient 
element of material fire is not wilder 
than this of Fanaticism ; nor, though 
visible to the eye, is it more real. Voli- 
tion bursts forth involuntarily — volun- 
tary; rapt along; the movement of free 
human minds becomes a raging tornado 
of fatalism, blind as the winds; and 



224 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Mountain and Gironde, when they re- 
cover themselves, are ahke astounded to 
see where it has flung and dropped them. 
To such height of miracle can men work 
on men ; the Conscious and the Uncon- 
scious blended inscrutably in this our 
inscrutable Life ; endless Necessity en- 
vironing Freewill ! 

French Revolution. 

September 21st. 
Wheresoever Disorder may stand or 
lie, let It have a care ; here is the man 
that has declared war with it, that never 
will make peace with it. Man is the 
Missionary of Order; he is the servant 
not of the Devil and Chaos, but of God 
and the Universe! Let all sluggards 
and cowards, remiss, false-spoken, un- 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 225 

just, and otherwise diabolic persons have 
a care : this is a dangerous man for them. 

Past and Present. 

September 22d. 
Beautiful it is to understand and know 
that a Thought did never yet die ; that as 
thou, the originator thereof, has gathered 
it and created it from the whole Past, 
so thou wilt transmit it to the whole 
Future. It is thus that the heroic Heart, 
the seeing Eye of the first times, still 
feels and sees in us of the latest; that 
the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, 
and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of 
witnesses and brothers ; and there is a 
living, literal Coinmunion of Saints, wide 
as the World itself, and as the History 
of the World. 

Sartor Resartus. 



226 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

September 2jd. 

The Reformation might bring what 
results it liked when it came, but the 
Reformation simply could not help com- 
ing. To all Popes and Popes' advocates, 
expostulating, lamenting and accusing, 
the answer of the world is : Once for all, 
your Popehood has become untrue. No 
matter how good it was, how good you 
say it is, we cannot believe it ; the light 
of our whole mind, given us to walk by 
from Heaven above, finds it henceforth 
a thing unbelievable. We will not be- 
lieve it, we will not try to believe it, — we 
dare not ! The thing is untrue; we were 
traitors against the Giver of all Truth, 
"if we durst pretend to think it true. 
Away with it; let whatsoever likes come 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 227 

in the place of it : with it we can have no 
farther trade ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

September 24th. 
Man is a Tool-using Animal (Han- 
thierendes Thier). Weak in himself, and 
of small stature, he stands on a basis, at 
most for the flattest-soled, of some half- 
square foot, insecurely enough; has to 
straddle out his legs, lest the very wind 
supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds ! Three 
quintals are a crushing load for him; 
the Steer of the meadows tosses him 
aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he 
can use Tools, can devise Tools: with 
these the granite mountain melts into 
light dust before him ; he kneads glowing 
iron, as if it were soft paste ; seas are his 
smooth highway, winds and fire his un- 



22S BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

wearying steeds. Nowhere do you find 
him without Tools ; without Tools he is 
nothing, with Tools he is all. 

Sartor Resartus. 



September 2^th. 
Yes, Reader, here is the miracle. Out 
of that putrescent rubbish of Scepticism, 
Sensualism, Sentimentalism, hollow 
Machiavelism, such a Faith has verily 
risen ; flaming in the heart of a People. 
A whole People, awakening as it were 
to consciousness in deep misery, believes 
that it is within reach of a Fraternal 
Heaven-on-Earth. With longing arms, 
it struggles to embrace the Unspeakable ; 
cannot embrace it, owing to certain 
causes. — Seldom do we find that a whole 
People can be said to have any Faith at 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 229 



all; except in things which it can eat 
and handle. Whensoever it gets any 
Faith, its history becomes spirit-stirring, 
note-worthy. But since the time when 
steel Europe shook itself simultaneously, 
at the word of Hermit Peter, and rushed 
toward the Sepulchre where God had 
lain, there was no universal impulse of 
Faith that one could note. Since Protest- 
antism went silent, no Luther's voice, 
no Zisca's drum any longer proclaiming 
that God's Truth was not the Devil's 
Lie; and the last of the Cameronians 
(Renwick was the name of him; honour 
to the name of the brave!) sank, shot, 
on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, there 
was no partial impulse of Faith among 
Nations. 

French Revolution, 



230 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

September 26th. 
Great men are the inspired (speaking 
and acting) Texts of that divine Book 
OF Revelations, whereof a Chapter is 
completed from epoch to epoch, and by 
some named History ; to which inspired 
Texts your numerous talented men, and 
your innumerable untalented men, are 
the better or worse exegetic Comment- 
aries, and wagon-load of too-stupid, 
heretical or orthodox, weekly Sermons. 
For my study, the inspired Texts them- 
selves ! 

Sartor Resartus. 

September 2/th. 

On the whole, who knows how to 

reverence the Body of a Man? It is the 

most reverend phenomenon under this 

Sun. For the Highest God dwells visible 



FROM THOMA S CARL YLE 231 

in that mystic unfathomable Visibility, 
which calls itself "I" on the Earth. 

Past and Present. 

September 28th. 
Paganism we recognized as a veracious 
expression of the earnest awe-struck 
feeling of man towards the Universe; 
veracious, true once, and still not with- 
out worth for us. But mark here the 
difference of Paganism and Christian- 
ism; one great difference. Paganism 
emblemed chiefly the Operations of 
Nature; the destinies, efforts, combina- 
tions, vicissitudes of things and men in 
this world; Christianism emblemed the 
Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of 
Man. One was for the sensuous nature ; 
a rude helpless utterance of the first 
Thought of men, — the chief recognised 



232 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. 
The other was not for the sensuous 
nature, but for the moral. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

September 2pth. 
Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief 
in yourself. 

Sartor Resartus. 

September joth. 
Of hearts made by the Almighty God 
I will not believe such a thing. Deep- 
hidden under wretchedest god-forget- 
ting Cants, Epicurisms, Dead-Sea Ap- 
isms ; forgotten as under foulest fat 
Lethe mud and weeds, there is yet, in 
all hearts born into this God's-World, 
a spark of the Godlike slumbering. 
Awake, O nightmare sleepers; awake, 
arise, or be forever fallen ! 

J'ast and Present. 



OCTOBER 



October isf. 

All that is without us will change 
while we think not of it ; much even that 
is within us. The truth that was yester- 
day a restless Problem, has to-day grown 
a Belief burning to be uttered: on the 
morrow, contradiction has exasperated 
it into mad Fanaticism; obstruction has 
dulled it into sick Inertness ; it is sinking 
towards silence, of satisfaction or of 
resignation. To-day is not Yesterday, 
for man or for thing. Yesterday there 
was the oath of Love ; to-day has come 
the curse of Hate. Not willingly: ah, 
no; but it could not help coming. The 
golden radiance of youth, would it will- 
ingly have tarnished itself into the dim- 



236 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ness of old age? — Fearful : how we stand 
enveloped, deep-sunk, in that Mystery of 
Time; and are Sons of Time; fashioned 
and woven out of Time ; and on us, and 
on all that we have, or see, or do, is 
written : Rest not, Continue not, For- 
ward to thy doom ! 

French Revolution. 

October 2d. 
There must be something wrong. A 
full formed Horse will, in any market, 
bring from twenty to as high as two 
hundred Friederichs d'or : such is his 
worth to the world. A full formed Man 
is not only worth nothing to the world, 
but the world could afford him a round 
sum would he simply engage to go and 
hang himself. Nevertheless, which of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 237 

the two was the more cunningly-devised 
article, even as an Engine? 

Sartor Resartus. 



October ^d. 
You have heard of St. Chrysostom's 
celebrated saying in reference to the 
Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible 
Revelation of God, among the Hebrews : 
"The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it 
is even so: this is no vain phrase; it is 
veritably so. The essence of our being, 
the mystery in us that calls itself "I," — 
ah, what words have we for such things ? 
— is a breath of Heaven; the Highest 
Being reveals himself in man. This 
body, these faculties, this life of ours, is 
it not all as a vesture for that Unnamed ? 
'There is but one temple in the Uni- 



238 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

verse," says the devout Novalis, "and 
that is the Body of Man. Nothing is 
hoHer than that high form. Bending 
before men is a reverence done to this 
Revelation in the Flesh. We touch 
Heaven when we lay our hand on a hu- 
man body !" This sounds much like a 
mere flourish of rhetoric ; but it is not so. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

October 4th. 
Brother, this Planet, I find, is but an 
inconsiderable sandgrain in the conti- 
nents of Being: this Planet's poor tem- 
porary interests, thy interests and my m- 
terests there, when I look fixedly into 
that eternal Light-Sea and Flame-Sea 
with its eternal interests, dwindle literally 
into nothing; my speech of it is — silence 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 239 

for the while. I will as soon think of 
making Galaxies and Star-Systems to 
guide little herring-vessels by, as of 
preaching Religion that the Constable 
may continue possible. 

Past and Present. 



October ^th. 

Ach Gott, when I gazed into these 
Stars, have they not looked down on me 
as if with pity, from their serene spaces ; 
like Eyes glistening with heavenly tears 
over the little lot of man! Thousands 
of human generations, all as noisy as our 
own, have been swallowed up of Time, 
and there remains no wreck of them any 
more; and Arcturus and Orion and 
Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining 



240 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

in their courses, clear and young, as 
when the Shepherd first noted them in 
the plain of Shinar. 

Sartor Resartus. 

October 6th. 
What an umpire Nature is; what a 
greatness, composure of depth and 
tolerance there is in her. You take 
wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom : 
your wheat may be mixed with chafif, 
chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and 
all imaginable rubbish ; no matter : you 
cast it into the kind just Earth; she 
grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she 
silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says 
nothing of the rubbish. The yellow 
wheat is growing there ; the good Earth 
is silent about all the rest, — has silently 
turned all the rest to some benefit too, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 241 

and makes no complaint about it! So 
everywhere in Nature ! She is true and 
not a He; and yet so great, and just, and 
motherly in her truth. She requires of 
a thing only that it he genuine of heart ; 
she will protect it if so; will not, if not 
so. There is a soul of truth in all the 
things she ever gave harbour to. Alas, 
is not this the history of all highest 
Truth that comes or ever came into the 
world? The hody of them all is im- 
perfection, an element of light in dark- 
ness : to us they have to come embodied 
in mere Logic, in some merely scientific 
Theorem of the Universe; which cannot 
be complete; which cannot but be found 
one day incomplete, erroneous^ and so 
die and disappear. The body of all 
Truth dies ; and yet in all, I say, there is 



242 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

a soul which never dies ; which in new 
and ever-nobler embodiment lives im- 
mortal as man himself! It is the way 
with Nature. The genuine essence of 
Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a 
voice from the great Deep of Nature, 
there is the point at Nature's judgment- 
seat. What zve call pure or impure, is 
not with her the final question. Not 
how much chaff is in you : but whether 
you have any wheat. Pure ! I might say 
to many a man : Yes, you arc pure ; pure 
enough; but you are chaff, — insincere 
hypothesis, hearsay, formality ; you never 
were in contact with the great heart of 
the Universe at all ; you are properly 
neither pure or impure; you are 
nothing. Nature has no business with 
you. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 243 

October yth. 
Very frightful it is when a Nation, 
rendering asunder its Constitutions and 
Regulations which were grown dead 
cerements for it, becomes fmw^cendental ; 
and must now seek its wild way through 
the New, Chaotic, — where Force is not 
yet distinguished into Bidden and For- 
bidden, but Crime and Virtue welter un- 
separated, — in that domain of what is 
called the Passions ; of v/hat we call the 
Miracles and the Portents ! It is thus 
that, for some three years to come, we 
are to contemplate France, in this final 
Third Volume of our History. Sans- 
cullotism reigning in all its grandeur 
and in all its hideousness: the Gospel 
(God's -Message) of Man's Rights, 
Man's mights or strengths, once more 



244 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

preached irrefragably abroad ; along with 
this, and still louder for the time, the 
fearfullest Devil's-Message of Man's 
weaknesses and sins ; — and all on such a 
scale and under such aspect : cloudy 
''death-birth of a world ;" huge smoke- 
cloud, streaked with rays as of heaven 
on one side; girt on the other as with 
hell-fire ! History tells us many things : 
but for the last thousand years and more, 
what thing has she told us of a sort like 
this? 

French Revolution. 

October 8th. 
For there is a perennial nobleness, 
and even sacredness, in Work. Were 
he never so benighted, forgetful of his 
high calling, there is always hope in a 
man that actually and earnestly works: 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 245 

in Idleness alone is there perpetual des- 
pair. Work, never so Mammonish, 
mean, is in communication with Nature ; 
the real desire to get Work done will 
itself lead one more and more to truth, 
to Nature's appointments and regula- 
tions, which are truth. 

Past and Present. 

October pth. 

How beautiful to die of broken- heart, 
on Paper ! Quite another thing in Prac- 
tice ; every window of your Feelmg, even 
of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed 
and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray 
can enter ; a whole Drug-shop in your 
inwards : the foredone soul drowning 
slowly in quagmires of Disgust ! 

Sartor Resartus. 



246 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October loth. 
How true, for example, is that other 
old Fable of the Sphinx, who sat by the 
wayside, propounding her riddle to the 
passengers, which if they could not 
answer she destroyed them ! Such a 
Sphinx is this Life of ours, to all men 
and societies of men. 

Past and Present. 

October nth. 
To me nothing seems more natural 
than that the Son of Man, when such 
God-given mandate first prophetically 
stirs within him, and the Clay must now 
be vanquished or vanquish, — should be 
carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, 
and there fronting the Tempter do 
grimmest battle with him ; defiantly 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 247 



settting him at nought, till he yield and 
fly. Name it as we choose : with or with- 
out visible Devil, whether in the natural 
Desert of rocks and sands, or in the 
populous moral Desert of selfishness and 
baseness,— to such Temptation are we 
all called. Unhappy if we are not ! 

Sartor Resartus. 

October 12th. 
I admire a Nation which fancies it 
will die if it do not undersell all other 
Nations, to the end of the world. 
Brothers, we will cease to unders&W 
them; we will be content to equal-s^W 
them ; to be happy selling equally with 
them! I do not see the use of under- 
selling them. Cotton-cloth is already 
two-pence a yard or lower ; and yet bare 



248 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

backs were nevermore numerous among 
us. Let inventive men cease to spend 
their existence incessantly contriving 
how cotton can be made cheaper ; and try 
to invent, a little, how cotton at its 
present cheapness could be somewhat 
justlier divided among us ! 

Past and Present. 

October 13th. 
For it is false altogether what the last 
Sceptical Century taught us, that this 
world is a steam-engine. There is a^ 
God in this world ; and a God-sanction, 
or else the violation of such, does look 
out from all ruling and obedience, from 
all moral acts of men. There is no act 
more moral between men than that of 
rule and obedience. Woe to him that 
claims obedience when it is not due ; woe 



FROM THOMA S CA RL VLB i a 9 

to him that refuses it when it is ! God's 
laws is in that, I say, however the Parch- 
ment-laws may run: there is a Divine 
Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the 
heart of every claim that one man makes 
upon another. 

Heroes and Hero Worship 

October 14th. 
Vain truly is the hope of your swiftest 
Runner to escape "from his own 
Shadow." 

Sartor Resartus. 

October 15th. 
Let inventive men consider, Whether 
the Secret of this Universe, and of Man's 
Life there, does, after all, as we rashly 
fancy it, consist in making money? 
There is one God, just, supreme, al- 



250 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

mighty : but is Mammon the name of 
him? — With a Hell which means "Fail- 
ing to make money," I do not think there 
is any Heaven possible that would suit 
one well ; nor so much as an Earth that 
can be habitable long ! 

Past and Present. 

October i6th. 
So has it been from the beginning, so 
will it be to the end. Generation after 
generation takes to itself the Form of a 
Body ; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian 
Night, on Heaven's mission appears. 
What Force and Fire is in each he ex- 
pends : one grinding in the mill of Indus- 
try ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy 
Alpine heights of Science; one madly 
dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, 
in war with his fellow: — and then the 



FROM THOMA S CARLYLE 251 

Heaven-sent is recalled ; his earthly Ves- 
ture falls away, and vSoon even to Sense 
becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like 
some wild-flaming, wild-thundering* train 
of Heaven's Artillery, does this mys- 
terious Mankind thunder and flame, in 
long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, 
through the unknown Deep. Thus, like 
a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, 
we emerge from the Inane ; haste storm- 
fully across the astonished Earth; then 
plunge again into the Inane. Earth's 
mountains are levelled, and her seas filled 
up, in our passage : can the Earth, which 
is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits 
which have reality and are alive? On 
the hardest adamant some foot-print of 
us is stamped in ; the last Rear of the host 
will read traces of the earliest Van. But 



252 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

whence? — O Heaven, whither? Sense 
knows not ; Faith knows not ; only that it 
is through Mystery to Mystery, from 
God and to God. 

Sartor Resartus 

October lyth. 
For example, you Bobus Higgins, 
Sausage-maker on the great scale, who 
are raising such a clamour for this Aris- 
tocracy of Talent, what is it that you do, 
in that big heart of yours, chiefly in very 
fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent, 
intrinsic manly worth of any kind you 
unfortunate Bobus? The manliest man 
that you saw going in a ragged coat, did 
you ever reverence him ? did you so much 
as know that he was a manly man at all, 
till his coat grew better? Talent! 1 
understand you to be able to worship the 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 253 

fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity 
or other success of talent ; but the talent 
itself is a thing you never saw with eyes. 

Past and Present. 

October i8th. 
Great men are not ambitious in that 
sense ; he is a small poor man that is 
ambitious so. Examine the man who lives 
in misery because he does not shine above 
other men ; who goes about producing 
himself, pruriently anxious about his 
gifts and claims ; struggling to force 
everybody, as it were begging everybody 
for God's sake, to acknowledge him a 
great man, and set him over the heads of 
men! Such a creature is among the 
wretchedest sights seen under this sun. 
A great man ! A poor morbid prurient 



254 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

empty man ; fitter for the ward of a hos- 
pital, than for a throne among men. I 
advise you to keep-out of his way. He 
cannot walk on quiet paths ; unless you 
will look at him, wonder at him, write 
paragraphs about him, he cannot live. 
It is the emptiness of the man, not his 
greatness. Because there is a nothing 
in himself, he hungers and thirsts that 
you would find something m him. In 
good truth, I believe no great man, not 
so much as a genuine man who had 
health and real substance in him of what- 
ever magnitude, who was ever much tor- 
mented in this way. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

October igth. 
The ''wages" of every noble Work do 
yet lie in Heaven or else Nowhere. Not 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 255 

in Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's 
Labour-Bank, or any the most improved 
establishment of banking and money- 
changing, needest thou, heroic soul, pre- 
sent thy account of earnings. 

Past and Present. 



October 20th. 

Most true is it, as a wise man teaches 
us, that ''Doubt of any sort cannot be re- 
moved except by Action." On which 
ground too let him who gropes painfully 
in darkness or uncertain light, and prays 
vehemently that the dawn may ripen into 
day, lay this other precept well to heart, 
which to me was of invaluable service: 
''Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,'' 
which thou knowest to be a Duty. 

Sartor Resartus, 



256 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October 21st. 

Venerable Justice herself began by 
Wild-Justice; all Law is as a tamed 
furrow-field, slowly worked out. and 
rendered arable, from the waste jungle 
of Club-Law. 

Past and Present. 

October 22d. 
How was it, then, that here, when 
trembling to the core of his heart, he did 
not sink into swoons, but rose into 
strength, into fearlessness and clearness? 
It was his guiding Genius {Damon) that 
inspired him ; he must go forth and meet 
his Destiny. Shew thyself now, whis- 
pered it, or be for ever hid. Thus some- 
times it is even when your anxiety be- 
comes transcendental, that the soul first 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 257 

feels herself able to transcend it ; that she 
rises above it, in fiery victory ; and, borne 
on new-found wings of victory, moves 
so calmly, even because so rapidly, so 
irresistibly. 

Sartor Resartus. 

October 2^d. 
Very singular to look into it: how a 
kind of order rises up in all conditions 
of human existence; and wherever two 
or three are gathered together, there are 
found modes of existing together, habi- 
tudes, observances, nay gracefulnesses, 
joys ! 

French Revolution. 

October 24th. 
It Is the Night of the World, and still 
long till it be Day : we wander amid the 



258 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

glimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun 
and the Stars of Heaven are as blotted 
out for a season ; and two immeasurable 
Fantoms, Hypocrisy and Atheism, with 
the Gowle, Sensuality, stalk abroad 
over the Earth, and call it theirs : well at 
ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence 
is a shallow Dream. 

Sartor Resartus. 



October z^th. 

How have we to regret not only that 
men have no ''religion/' but that they 
have next to no reflection ; and go about 
with heads full of mere extraneous 
noises, with eyes wide-open but vision- 
less, — for most part, in the somnambulist 
state ! 

Past and Present. 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 2 59 

October 26th. 
Such transitions are ever full of pain : 
thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly ; 
and, to attain his new beak, must harshly 
dash off the old one upon rocks. 

Sartor Resartus. 

October 2yth. 
Or apart from all Transcendentalism, 
is not a plain truth of sense, which the 
duller mind can even consider as a 
truism, that human things wholly are in 
continual movement, and action and re- 
action; working continually forward, 
phasis after phasis, by unalterable laws, 
toward prescribed issues? How often 
must we say, and yet not rightly lay to 
heart: The seed that is sown^, it will 
spring! Given the summer's blossom- 



26o BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ing, then there is also given the autumnal 
withering : so is it ordered not with seed- 
fields only, but with transactions, 
arrangements, philosophies, societies, 
French Revolutions, whatsoever man 
works with in this lower world. The 
Beginning holds in it the End, and all 
that leads thereto ; as the acorn does the 
oak and its fortunes. Solemn enough, 
did we think of it, — which unhappily and 
also happily we do not very much ! Thou 
there canst begin ; the Beginning is for 
thee, and there : but where, and of what 
sort, and for whom will the end be? All 
grows, and seeks and endures its des- 
tinies : consider likewise how much 
grows, as the trees do, whether we think 
of it or not. 

French Revolution. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE i6i 

October 28th. 
Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, In- 
dignation, Despair itself, all these like 
helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the 
poor dayworker, as of every man : but he 
bends himself with free valour against 
his task, and all these are stilled, all these 
shrink murmuring far off into their 
caves. The man is now a man. The 
blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not 
as purifying fire, wherein all poison is 
burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there 
is made bright blessed flame? 

Past and Present. 

October 2pth. 

Small men, most active, useful, are to 

be seen everywhere, whose whole activity 

depends on some conviction which to you 

is palpably a limited one, imperfect, what 



262 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

we call an error. But would it be a 
kindness always, is it a duty always or 
often, to disturb them in that? Many a 
man, doing loud work in the world, 
stands only on some thin traditionality, 
conventionality ; to him indubitable, to 
you incredible : break that beneath him, 
he sinks to endless depths! ''I might 
hav^e my hand full of truth," said Fon- 
tenelle, "and yet open only my little 
finger." 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

October joth. 
How true that there is nothing dead 
in this Universe ; that what we call dead 
is only changed, its forces working in 
inverse order ! *'The leaf that lies 
rotting in moist winds," says one, "has 
still force; else how could it rotf" Our 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 263 

whole Universe is but an infinite Com- 
plex of Forces ; thousandfold, from 
Gravitation up to Thought and Will; 
man's Freedom environed with Necessity 
of Nature: in all which nothing at any 
moment slumbers, but all is for ever 
awake and busy. The thing that lies 
isolated, inactive thou shalt nowhere 
discover; seek every where from the 
granite mountain, slow-mouldering since 
Creation, to the passing cloud-vapour, 
to the living man; to the action, to 
the spoken word of man. The word 
that is spoken, as we know, flies-irrevo- 
cable : not less, but more, the action that 
is done. "The gods themselves," sings 
Pindar, "cannot annihilate the action that 
is done." No: this once done, is done 
always; cast forth into endless Time; 



264 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

and, long conspicuous, or soon hidden, 
must verily work and grow for ever 
there, an indestructible new element in 
the Infinite of Things. 

French Revolution. 



October ^ist. 

Creation, says one, lies before us, like 
a glorious Rainbow ; but the Sun that 
made it lies behind us, hidden from us. 
Then, in that strange Dream, how we 
clutch at shadows as if they were sub- 
stances ; and sleep deepest while fancy- 
ing ourselves most awake ! Which of 
your Philosophical Systems is other than 
a dream-theorem ; a net quotient, confi- 
dently given out, where divisor and divi- 
dend are both unknown? 

Sartor Resartus. 



NOVEMBER 



November ist. 
Sansculottism verily was alive, a New- 
Birth of Time; nay it still lives, and is 
not dead, but changed. The soul of it 
still lives; still works far and wide, 
through one bodily shape into another 
less amorphous, as is the way of cunning 
Time with his New-Births : — till, in some 
perfected shape, it embrace the whole 
circuit of the world ! For the wise man 
may now everywhere discern that he 
must found on his manhood, not on the 
garnitures of his manhood. He who, 
in these Epochs of our Europe, founds 
on garnitures, formulas, culottisms of 
what sort soever, is founding on an old 
cloth and sheep-skin, and cannot endure. 
But as for the body of Sansculottism, 



268 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

that is dead and buried, — and, one hopes, 
need not reappear, in primary amorphous 
shape, for another thousand years ! 

French Revolution. 

Novetnher 2d. 
The manner of men's Hero-worship, 
verily it is the innermost fact of their 
existence, and determines all the rest, — 
at public hustings, in private drawing- 
rooms, in church, in market, and wher- 
ever else. Have true reverence, and 
what indeed is inseparable therefrom, 
leverence the right man, all is well ; have 
sham-reverence, and what also follows, 
greet with it the wrong man, then all 
is ill, and there is nothing well. Alas, 
if Hero-worship become Dilettantism, 
and all except !Mammonism be a vain 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 269 

grimace, how much, in this most earnest 
Earth, has ever and is evermore going 
to fatal destruction, and lies wasting in 
quiet lazy ruin, no man regarding it ! 

Past and Present. 



'November jd. 

The man who cannot wonder, who 
does not habitually wonder (and wor- 
ship), were he President of innumerable 
Royal Societies, and carried the whole 
M^canique Gleste and Hegeles Philos- 
ophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories 
and Observatories with their results, in 
his single head,— is but a Pair of Spec- 
tacles behind which there is no Eye. Let 
those who have Eyes look through him, 
then he may be useful. 

Sartor Resartus. 



2 70 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

November 4th. 

Looking round on the noisy inanity 
of the world, words with Httle meaning, 
actions with Httle worth, one loves to 
reflect on the great Empire of Silence. 
The noble silent men, scattered here and 
there, each in his department ; silently 
thinking, silently working ; whom no 
Morning Newspaper makes mention of! 
They are the salt of the Earth. A 
country that has none or few of these is 
in a bad way. Like a forest which has 
no roots; which had all turned into leaves 
and boughs ; — which must soon wither 
and be no forest. Woe for us if we had 
nothing but what we can shoiv, or speak. 
Silence, the great Empire of Silence: 
higher than the stars ; deeper than the 
Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 271 

all else is small.- — I hope we English will 
long maintain our grand talent pour le 
silence. Let others that cannot do with- 
out standing on barrel-heads, to spout, 
and be seen of all the market-place, culti- 
vate speech exclusively, — become a most 
green forest without roots? 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



'November ^th. 

Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, 
in those eyes where plays the lambent 
fire of Kindness, or in those where rages 
the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel 
how thy own so quiet Soul is straight- 
way involuntarily kindled with the like, 
and ye blaze and reverberate on each 
other, till it is all one limitless confluent 



272 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

flame (of embracing Love, or of deadly- 
grappling Hate) ; and then say what 
miraculous virtue goes out of man into 
man. 

Sartor Resartus. 

November 6th. 
Or, indeed, what is this Infinite of 
Things itself, which men name Universe, 
but an action, a sum-total of Actions and 
Activities ? The living ready-made sum- 
total of these three, — which Calculation 
cannot add, cannot bring on its tablets ; 
yet the sum, we say, is written visible: 
All that has been done, All that is doing, 
All that will be done! Understand it 
well, the Thing thou beholdest, that 
Thing is an Action, the product and ex- 
pression of exerted Force: the All of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 273 



Things is an infinite conjugation of the 
verb To do. Shoreless Fountain-Ocean 
of Force, of power to do; wherein Force 
rolls and circles, billowing, many- 
streamed, harmonious; wide as Immen- 
sity, deep as Eternity; beautiful and 
terrible, not to be comprehended : this is 
what man names Existence and Uni- 
verse ; this thousand-tinted Flame-image, 
at once veil and revelation, reflex such as 
he, in his poor brain and heart, can paint, 
of One Unnameable dwelling in inaccess- 
ible light! From beyond the Star-gal- 
axies, from before the Beginning of 
Days, it billows and rolls, — round thee, 
nay thyself art of it, in this point of 
Space where thou now standest, in this 
moment which thy clock measures. 

French Revolution. 



274 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

November yth. 
Subdue mutiny, discord, widespread 
despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy 
and wisdom. Chaos is dark, deep as 
Hell ; let light be, and there is instead a 
green flowery World. O, it is great, and 
there is no other greatness. To make 
some nook of God's Creation a little 
fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God ; 
to make some human hearts a little 
wiser, manfuller, happier, — more blessed, 
less accursed ! It is work fo^ a God. 

Past and Present. 

November 8th. 

A just man will generally have better 

cause than money in what shape soever, 

before deciding to revolt against his 

Government. He will say : "Take my 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 275 

money, since you can, and it is so desir- 
able to you ; take it — and take yourself 
away with it ; and leave me alone to my 
work here. / am still here; can still 
work, after all the money you have 
taken from me !" But if they come to 
him and say, "Acknovv^ledge a Lie ; pre- 
tend to say you are worshipping God, 
when you are not doing it: believe not 
the thing that you find true, but the thing 
that I find, or pretend to find true !" He 
will answer: ''No; by God's help, no! 
You may take my purse; but I cannot 
have my moral self annihilated. The 
purse is any Highwayman's who might 
meet me with a loaded pistol: but the 
Self is mine and God my Maker's ; it is 
not yours ; and I will resist you to the 
death, and revolt against you, and, on the 



276 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

whole, front all manner of extremities, 
accusations and confusions, in defense 
of that !" 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

November ptJi. 

Neither say that thou hast now no 
Symbol of the Godlike. Is not God's 
Universe a Symbol of the Godlike; is 
not Immensity a Temple, is not Man's 
History, and Men's History, a perpetual 
Evangel? Listen, and for organ-music 
thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the Morn- 
ing Stars sing together. 

Sartor Resartus. 

November loth. 
Wherefore let all men know what of 
depth and of height is still revealed in 
man; and, with fear and wonder, with 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 277 

just sympathy and just antipathy, with 
clear eye and open heart, contemplate 
it and appropriate it ; and draw innumer- 
able inferences from it. This inference 
for example, among the first: "That if 
the gods of this lower world will sit on 
their glittering thrones, indolent as Epi- 
curus' gods, with the living Chaos of 
Ignorance and Hunger weltering uncared 
for at their feet, and smooth Parasites 
preaching, Peace, peace, when there is 
no peace, " then the dark Chaos, it would 
seem, will rise ; has risen, and O Heavens ! 
has it not tanned their skins into breeches 
for itself? That there be no second 
Sansculottism in our Earth for a thous- 
and years, let us understand well what 
the first was ; and let Rich and Poor of 
us go and do otherwise. 

French Revolution, 



278 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

November iiih. 

How can there be any remedy in 
insurrection? It is a mere announce- 
ment of the disease, — visible now even to 
Sons of Night. Insurrection usually 
"gains" little ; usually wastes how much ! 
One of its worst kinds of waste, to say 
nothing of the rest, is that of irritating 
and exasperating men against each other, 
by violence done ; which is always sure 
to be injustice done, for violence does 
even justice unjustly. 

Past and Present. 

November 12th. 

With respect to Duels, indeed I have 

my own ideas. Few things, in this so 

surprising world, strike me with more 

surprise. Two little visual Spectra of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 279 

men, hovering with insecure enough co- 
hesion in the midst of the Unfathom- 
able^ and to dissolve therein, at any rate, 
very soon, — make pause at the distance 
of twelve paces asunder ; whirl round ; 
and simultaneously by the cunningest 
mechanism, explode one another into 
Dissolution ; and off-hand become Air, 
and Non-extant ! Deuce on it {yer- 
dammt), the little spitfires! — Nay, I 
think with old Hugo von Trimberg: 
"God must needs laugh outright, could 
such a thing be, to see his wondrous 
Manikins here below." 

Sartor Resartus. 

November i^th. 
For the faith in an Invisible, Unname- 
able, Godlike, present everywhere in all 



28o BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

that we see and work and suffer, is the 
essence of all faith whatsoever ; and that 
once denied, or still worse, asserted with 
lips only, and out of bound prayerbooks 
only, what other things remain believ- 
able? 

Past aud Present. 



November 14th. 

Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the Im- 
pediment too is in thyself: thy Condition 
is but the stuff thou art to shape that 
same Ideal out of : what matters whether 
such stuff be of this sort or that, so the 
Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? 
O thou that pinest in the imprisonment 
of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the 
gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 281 

create, know this of a truth: the thing 
thou seekest is already with thee, "here 
or nowhere," couldst thou only see! 

Sartor Resartus 



November 13th. 

All misery is faculty misdirected, 
strength that has not yet found its way. 
The black whirlwind is mother of the 
lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but 
can become flame and radiance ! 

Pasi and Present. 



November 16th. 

A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts 
of all men; no man is made altogether 
of Poetry. We are all poets when we 
read a poem well. The ''imagination that 



282 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not 
that the same faculty, weaker in degree, 
as Dante's own? 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



Noz'eniber i/th. 

Fight on, thou brave true heart, and 
falter not, through dark fortune and 
throligh bright. The cause thou lightest 
for, so far as it is true, no farther, yet 
precisely so far, is very sure of victory. 
The falsehood alone of it will be con- 
quered, will be abolished, as it ought to 
be : but the truth of it is part of Nature's 
own Laws, co-operates with the World's 
eternal Tendencies, and cannot be con- 
quered. 

Past and Present. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 283 

November i8th. 

Musical : how much Hes in that ; A 
musical thought is one spoken by a mind 
that has penetrated into the inmost 
heart of the thing; detected the inmost 
mystery of it, namely the melody that 
lies hidden in it ; the inward harmony of 
coherence which is its soul, whereby it 
exists, and has a right to be, here in this 
world. All inmost things, we may say, 
are melodious ; naturally utter themselves 
in Song. The meaning of Song goes 
deep. Who is there that, in logical 
words, can express the effect music has 
on us ? A kind of inarticulate unfathom- 
able speech, which leads us to the edge 
of the Infinite, and lets us for moments 
gaze into that! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



284 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

November i^th. 

Properly speaking, the Land belongs 
to these two : To the Almighty God and 
to all His Children of Alen that have 
ever worked well on it, or that shall ever 
work well on it. No generation of men 
can or could, with never such solemnity 
and effort, sell Land on any other prin- 
ciple: it is not the property of any gen- 
eration, wc say, but that of all the past 
generations that have worked on it, and 
of all the future ones that shall work on it. 

Fasi and Present. 

November 20th. 

"In these distracted times," writes he, 

"when the Religious Principle, driven 

out of most Churches, either lies unseen 

in the hearts of good men, looking and 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 285 

longing and silently working there to- 
wards some new Revelation; or else 
wanders homeless over the world, like a 
disembodied soul seeking its terrestrial 
organisation, — into how many strange 
shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, 
does it not tentatively and errantly cast 
itself ! The higher Enthusiasm of man's 
nature is for the while without Ex- 
ponent; yet must it continue indestruc- 
tible, unweariedly active, and work 
blindly in the great chaotic deep; thus 
Sect after Sect, and Church after Church, 
bodies itself forth, and melts again into 
new metamorphosis." 

Sartor Resartus. 

November 21st. 
The first man who, looking with 
opened soul on this august Heaven and 



286 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which 
we name Nature, Universe and such like, 
the essence of which remains forever 
Unnameable ; he who first, gazing into 
this, fell on his knees, awestruck, in 
silence as is likeliest, — he. driven by inner 
necessity, the "audacious original" that 
he was, had done a thing, too, which all 
thoughtful hearts saw straightway to be 
an expressive, altogether adoptable thing! 
To bow the knee was ever since the atti- 
tude of supplication. 

Past and Present. 

November zzd. 

"If in youth." writes he once, "the 

Universe is majestically unveiling, and 

everywhere Heaven revealing itself on 

Earth, nowhere to the Young Man does 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 287 

this Heaven on Earth so immediately 
reveal itself as in the Young Maiden. 
Strangely enough, in this strange life of 
ours, it has been so appointed. On the 
whole, as I have often said, a Person 
(Personlichkeit) is ever holy to us; a 
certain orthodox Anthropomorphism 
connects my Me with all Thees in bonds 
of Love: but it is in this approximation 
of the Like and Unlike, that such 
heavenly attraction, as between Negative 
and Positive, first burns out into a flame. 
Is the pitifulest mortal Person, think you, 
indifferent to us? Is it not rather our 
heartfelt wish to be made one with him ; 
to unite him to us, by gratitude, by ad- 
miration, even by fear; or failing all 
these, unite ourselves to him? But how 
much more in this case of the Like-Un- 



288 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

like ! Here is conceded us the higher 
mystic possibility of such a union, the 
highest in our Earth ; thus in the con- 
ducing medium of Fantasy, flames forth 
that /?r^-development of the universal 
Spiritual Electricity, which, as unfolded 
between man and woman, we first em- 
phatically denominate Love. 

Sartor Resartus. 

November 2jd. 
Fire is the best of servants ; but what 
a master ! 

Fast mnd Present. 

November 24th. 
Curious, I say, and not sufficiently con- 
sidered : how everything does co-operate 
with all; not a leaf rotting on the high- 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 289 

way but is indissoluble portion of solar 
and stellar systems ; no thought, word 
or act of man but has sprung withal out 
of all men and works sooner or later 
recognisably or irrecognisably, on all 
men! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



November 25th. 

Hell generally signifies the Infinite 
Terror, the thing a man is infinitely 
afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from, 
struggling with his whole soul to escape 
from it. There is a Hell therefore, if 
you will consider, which accompanies 
man, in all stages of his history, and 
religious or other development; but the 
Hells of men and Peoples differ notably. 



290 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

With Christians it is the infinite terror 
of being found guilty before the Just 
Judge. 

Past and Presettt. 



November 26th. 

No Chaos can continue chaotic with a 
soul in it. Besouled with earnest human 
Nobleness, did not slaughter, violence 
and fire-eyed fury, grow into a chivalry; 
into a blessed Loyalty of Governor and 
Governed ? 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

November 2yth. 

Man's philosophies are usually the 
supplement of his practice; some orna- 
mental Logic-varnish, some outer skin 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 291 

of Articulate Intelligence, with which he 
strives to render his dumb Instinctive 
Doings presentable when they are done. 

Past and Present. 



November 28th. 

Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a 
man do his work; the fruit of it is the 
care of another than he. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



November 2Qth. 

Seek through this Universe; if with 
other than owl's eyes, thou wilt find 
nothing nourished there, nothing kept in 
life, but what has right to nourishment 
and life. 

Past and Present. 



292 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

November ^olJi. 

"Bending before men," if it is not to 
be a mere empty grimace, better dispensed 
with than practised, is Hero-worship, — a 
recognition that there does dwell in that 
presence of our brother somethmg 
divine ; that every created man, as Nova- 
lis said, is a ''revelation in the Flesh." 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



DECEMBER 



December ist. 
Meanwhile, we will hate Anarchy as 
Death, which it is ; and the things worse 
than Anarchy shall be .hated more! 
Surely Peace alone is fruitful. Anarchy 
is destruction: a burning up, say, of 
Shams and Insupportabilities ; but which 
leaves Vacancy behind. Know this also, 
that out of a world of Unwise nothing 
but an Unwisdom can be made. Arrange 
it, -Constitution-build it, sift it through 
Ballot-Boxes as thou wilt, it is and re- 
mains an Unwisdom,— the new prey of 
new quacks and unclean things, the latter 
end of it is slightly better than the be- 
ginning. Who can bring a wise thing 
out of men unwise? Not one. 

French Revolution. 



296 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

December 2d. 

Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are 
eternal : her small still voice, speaking 
from the inmost heart of us, shall not, 
under terrible penalties, be disregarded. 
No man can depart from the truth with- 
out damage to himself; no one million 
of men ; no Twenty-seven Millions of 
men. Show me a Nation fallen every- 
where into this course, so that each ex- 
pects it, permits it to others and himself, 
I will show you a Nation travelling with 
one assent on the broad way. The broad 
way, however many Banks of England, 
Cotton-Mills and Duke's Palaces, it may 
have! Not at happy Elysian fields, and 
everlasting crowns of victory, earned by 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 297 



silent Valour, will this Nation arrive; 
but at precipices, devouring gulfs, if it 
pause not. 



Past and Present. 



December ^d. 

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not 
intellectual only; it is moral also; a 
chronic atrophy and disease of the whole 
soul. A man lives by believing some- 
thing; not by debating and arguing 
about many things. A sad case for him 
when all that he can manage to believe is 
something he can button in his pocket, 
and with one or the other organ eat and 
digest ! Lower than that he will not get. 
We call those ages in which he gets so 
low, the mournfulest, sickest and mean- 
est of all ages. The world's heart is 



298 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

palsied, sick : how can any limb of it be 
whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all 
departments of the world's work'; dex- 
terous Similitude of Acting begins. The 
world's wages are pocketed, the world's 
work is not done. Heroes have gone 
out : Quacks have come in. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December 4th. 
It is not to die, or even to die of 
hunger, that makes a man wretched ; 
many men have died ; all men must die, — 
the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot 
of Pain. But it is to live miserable we 
know not why ; to work sore and yet gain 
nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet 
isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold 
universal Laissez-faire : it is to die slowly 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE agg 

all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, 
dead. Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed 
iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull ! 

Past and Present. 

December 5th. 
Bookkeeping by double entry is ad- 
mirable, and records several things in 
an exact manner. But the Mother 
Destinies also keep their Tablets; in 
Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a 
recording; and things as my Moslem 
friends say, are "written on the iron 
leaf." 

Past and Present. 

December 6th. 
The Great Man's sincerity is of the 
kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious 
of; nay, I suppose he is conscious rather 



300 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

of ^sincerity ; for what man can walk 
accurately by the law of truth for one 
day ? No, the Great Man does not boast 
himself sincere, far from that; perhaps 
does not ask himself if he is so: I would 
say rather, his sincerity does not depend 
on himself ; he cannot help being sincere ! 
The great Fact of Existence is great to 
him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out 
of the awful presence of this Reality. 
His mind is so made ; he is great by that, 
first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real 
as Life, real as Death, is this Universe 
to him. Though all men should forget 
its truth, and walk in a vain show, he 
cannot. At all moments the Flame- 
image glares-in upon him; undeniable, 
there, there! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 301 



December yth. 
A Soul is not like wind {spiritiis, or 
breath) contained within a capsule; the 
Almighty Maker is not like a Clock- 
maker that once, in old immemorial ages, 
having made his Horologe of a Universe, 
sits ever since and sees it go ! Not at 
all. 

Past and Present. 

December 8th. 
Nay all speech, even the commonest 
speech, has something of song in it : not 
a parish in the world but has its parish- 
accent; — the rhythm or /^//z^ to which 
the people there sing what, they have 
to say ! Accent is a kind of chanting ; 
all men have accent of their own, — 
though they only notice that of others. 



302 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Observe too how all passionate language 
does of itself become musical, — with a 
finer music than the mere accent ; the 
speech of a man even in zealous anger 
becomes a chant, a song. All deep things 
are Song. It seems somehow the very 
central essence of us. Song; as if all the 
rest were but wrappages and hulls ! The 
primal clement of us; of us, and of all 
things. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December gth. 
Man is created to fight ; he is perhaps 
best of all definable as a born soldier ; his 
life "a battle and a march," under the 
right General. It is forever indispen- 
sable for a man to fight: now with 
Necessity, with Barrenness, Scarcity, 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 303 

with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests, un- 
kempt Cotton ; — now also with the hallu- 
cinations of his poor fellow Men. 

Past and Present. 



December loth. 

If thou ask to what height man has 
carried it in this manner, look on our 
divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, 
and his Life, and his Biography, and 
what followed therefrom. Higher has 
the human Thought not yet reached: 
this is Christianity and Christendom; a 
Symbol of quite perennial infinite char- 
acter; whose significance will ever de- 
mand to be anew inquired into, and anew 
made manifest. 

Sartor Resartus, 



304 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



December lUh. 
All great Peoples are conservative; 
slow to believe novelties ; patient of niiich 
error in actualities; deeply and forever 
certain of the greatness that is in Law, 
in Custom once solemnly-established, 
and now long recognised as just and 
final. 

Past and Present. 

December 12th. 
How true is that of Novalis: "It is 
certain, my Belief gains quite infinitely 
the moment I can conceive another mind 
thereof!" 

Sartor Resartus. 

December i^th. 
Deeds are greater than Words. Deeds 
have such a life, mute but undeniable 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 305 

and grow as living trees and fruit-trees 
do ; they people the vacuity of Time, and 
make it green and worthy. Why should 
the oak prove logically that it ought to 
grow, and will grow ? Plant it, try it ; 
what gifts of diligent judicious assimila- 
tion and secretion it has, of progress and 
resistance, of force to grow, will then de- 
clare themselves. 

Past and Present. 

December 14th. 
Great souls are always loyally sub- 
missive, reverent to what is over them ; 
only small mean souls are otherwise. I 
could not find a better proof of what I 
said the other day, That the sincere man 
was by nature the obedient man ; that 
only in a world of Heroes was there loyal 



3o6 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Obedience to the Heroic. The essence 
of originaHty is not that it may be new ; 
Johnson beHeved altogether in the old ; 
he found the old opinions credible for 
him, fit for him ; and in a right heroic 
manner lived under them. He is well 
worth study in regard to that. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December i^th. 
And now what is it, if you pierce 
through his Cants, his oftrepeated Hear- 
says, what he calls his Worships and so 
forth, — what is it that the modern English 
soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, 
and contemplate with entire despair? 
What is his Hell ; after all these reputable 
oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With 
hesitation, with astonishment, I pro- 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 307 

nounce it to be : The terror of "Not suc- 
ceeding;" of not making money, fame, 
or some other figure in the world, — 
chiefly of not making money ! Is not 
that a somewhat singular Hell? 

Past and Present. 

December i6th. 
What of the world and its victories? 
Men speak too much about the world. 
Each one of us here, let the world go 
how it will, and be victorious, or not vic- 
torious, has he not a Life of his own to 
lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time 
between two Eternities ; no second chance 
to us forevermore ! It wxre well for us 
o live not as fools and simulacra, but as 
wise and realities. The world's being 
saved will not save us; nor the world's 



3o8 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

being lost destroy us. We should look 
to ourselves : there is great merit here in 
the ''duty of staying at home '" And on 
the whole, to say truth, I never heard of 
''worlds" being "saved" in any other 
way. For the saving of the world I will 
trust confidently to the Maker of the 
world ; and look a little to my own sav- 
ing, which I am more competent to ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December i/fh. 
All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, 
is the dusty conflict of strengths each 
thinking itself the strongest, or, in other 
words, the justest; — of Mights which do 
in the long-run, and forever will in this 
just Universe in the long-run, mean 
Rights. In conflict the perishable part 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 309 

of them, beaten sufficiently flies off into 
dust: this process ended, appears the 
imperishable, the true and exact. 

Past atid Present. 

December i8th. 
The highest Voice ever heard on this 
earth said withal, "Consider the lilies 
of the field, they toil not neither do they 
spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was 
not arrayed like one of these." A glance, 
that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. 
''The lilies of the field," — dressed finer 
than earthly princes, springing-up there 
in the humblefurrow-field ; a beautiful 
eye looking out on you, from the great 
inner Sea of Beauty ! How could the 
rude Earth make these, if her Essence, 
rugged as she looks and is, were not 
inwardly Beauty? 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



3IO BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

December iptJi. 
O thank thy Destiny for these ; thank- 
fully bear what yet remain ; thou hadst 
need of them ; the Self in thee needed to 
be annihilated. By benignant fever- 
paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep- 
seated chronic Disease, and triumphs 
over Death. On the roaring billows of 
Time, thou art not engulphed, but borne 
aloft into the azures of Eternity. Love 
not Pleasure; love God. This is the 
Everlasting Yea, wherein all contra- 
diction is solved ; wherein whoso walks 
and works, it is well with him. 

Sartor Resartus. 

December 20th. 
The only happiness a brave man ever 
troubled himself with asking much about 
was, happiness enough to get his work 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 3 1 1 

done. Not "I can't eat!'' but ''I can't 
work!" that was the burden of all wise 
complaining among men. It is, after all, 
the one unhappiness of a man. That he 
cannot work; that he cannot get his 
destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the 
day is passing swiftly over, cur life is 
passing swiftly over ; and the night Com- 
eth, wherein no man can work. The 
night once come, our happiness, our un- 
happiness, — it is all abolished. 

Past and Present. 

December 21st. 
Belief I define to be the healthy act of 
a man's mind. It is a mysterious in- 
describable process, that of getting to 
believe; — indescribable, as all vital acts 
are. We have our mind given us, not 



312 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

that it may cavil and argue, but that it 
may see into something, give us clear 
belief and understanding about some- 
thing, whereon we are then to proceed to 
act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. 
Certainly we do not rush out, clutch-up 
the first thing we find, and straightway 
believe that ! All manner of doubt, in- 
quiry, cTKei/zts as it is named, about all 
manner of objects, dwells in every reason- 
able mind. It is the mystic working of 
the mind, on the object it is getting to 
know and believe. Belief comes out of 
all this, above ground, like the tree from 
its hidden roots. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December 22d. 
The great unique heart : how like a 
child's in its simplicity, like a man's in 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 313 

its earnest solemnity and depth ! Heaven 
lies over him wheresoever he goes or 
stands on Earth ; making all the Earth a 
mystic Temple to him, the Earth's busi- 
ness all a kind of worship. Glimpses of 
bright creatures flash in the common 
sunlight ; angels yet hover doing God's 
messages among men : that rainbow was 
set in the clouds by the hand of God ! 
Wonder, miracle encompass the man ; he 
lives in an element of miracle ; Heaven's 
splendour over his head, Hell's darkness 
under his feet. A great Law of Duty, 
high as these two Infinities, dwarfing all 
else, annihilating all else. 

Past and Present. 

December 2^d. 
"Society," says he, "is not dead; that 
Carcass, which you call dead Society, 



314 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

is but her mortal coil which she has 
shuffled off, to assume a nobler ; she her- 
self, through perpetual metamorphoses, 
in fairer and fairer development, has to 
live till Time also merge m Eternity. 
Wheresoever two or three Living Men 
are gathered together, there is Society; 
or there it will be, with its cunning 
mechanisms and stupendous structures, 
overspreading this little Globe, and reach- 
ing upwards to Heaven and downwards 
to Gehenna: for always, under one or 
the other figure, it has two authentic 
Revelations, of a God and of a Devil; 
the Pulpit, namely and the Gallows." 

Sartor Resartus. 

December 24th. 
The spoken Word, the written Poem, 
is said to be an epitome of the man ; how 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 315 



much more the done Work. Whatso- 
ever of morahty and of intelhgence; 
what of patience, perseverance, faithful- 
ness, of method, insight, ingenuity, 
energy; in a word, whatsoever of 
Strength the man had in him will lie 
written in the Work he does. To Work : 
why, it is to try himself against Nature, 
and her everlasting unerring Laws : these 
will tell a true verdict as to the man. 

Past and Present. 

December 25th. 
A cause, the noblest of causes kindles 
itself, like a beacon set on high ; high as 
Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;— 
whereby the meanest man becomes not 
a Citizen only, but a member of Christ's 
visible Church ; a veritable Hero, if he 
prove a true man. 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 



3i6 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

December 26th. 
For strangely in this so solid-seeming 
World, which nevertheless is in continual 
restless flux, it is appointed that Sound, 
to appearance the most fleeting, should 
be the most continuing of all things. 
The Word is well said to be omnipotent 
in this world : man, thereby divine, can 
create as by a Fiat. 

Sartor Resartus. 

Decemher 2ph. 
But this I do say, and would wish all 
men to know and lay to heart, that he who 
discerns nothing but Mechanism in the 
Universe has in the fatalest way missed 
the secret of the Universe altogether. 
That all Godhood should vanish out of 
men's conception of this Universe seems 



FROM THOMA S CA RL YLE 3 1 7 

to me precisely the most brutal error, — 
I will not disparage Heathenism by call- 
ing it a Heathen error, — that men could 
fall into. It is not true ; it is false at the 
very heart of it. A man who thinks so 
will think zvrong about all things in the 
world ; this original sin will vitiate all 
other conclusions he can form. One 
might call it the most lamentable of De- 
lusions, — not forgetting Witchcraft it- 
self! Witchcraft worshipped at least a 
living Devil : but this worships a dead 
iron Devil ; no God, not even a Devil ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December 28th. 
For if a noble soul is rendered tenfold 
beauti fuller by victory and prosperity, 
springing now radiant as into his own 



3i8 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

due element and sun-throne ; an ignoble 
one is rendered tenfold and hundredfold 
uglier, pitifuller. Whatsoever vices, 
w^hatsoever weaknesses were in the man, 
the parvenu will show us them enlarged, 
as in the solar microscope, into frightful 
distortion. Nay, how many mere semi- 
nal principles of vice, hitherto all whole- 
somely kept latent, may we now see un- 
folded, as in the solar hot-house, into 
growth, into huge universally-conspicu- 
ous luxuriance and development ! 

Past and Present. 

December 2^th. 
In the garden at Wittenberg one even- 
ing at sunset, a little bird has perched for 
the night : That little bird, says Luther, 
above it are stars and deep Heaven of 



FROM THOMAS CARLYLE 319 

worlds ; yet it has folded its little wings ; 
gone trustfully to rest there as in its 
home : the Maker of it has given it too 
a home ! 

Heroes and Hero Worship. 

December ^oth. 
Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, 
there is thy eternal enemy; attack him 
swiftly, subdue him ; make Order of him, 
the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelli- 
gence, Divinity and Thee ! 

Pas^ and Present. 

December ^ist. 

And so here, O Reader, has the time 
come for us two to part. Toilsome was 
our journeying together; not without 
offense ; but it is done. To me thou wert 



320 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

as a beloved shade, the disembodied or 
not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To 
thee I was but as a \'oice. Yet was our 
relation a kind of sacred one ; doubt not 
that ! Whatsoever once sacred things 
become hollow jargons, yet while the 
V^oice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou 
not there the living fountain out of which 
all sacredness sprang, and will yet 
spring? Man. by the nature of him, is 
definable as "an incarnated Word." Ill 
stands it with me if I have spoken 
falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. 
Farewell. 

P> ench Revolution. 



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